


I’ve Found My Place, I’m Safe and Sound

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Angst, Bisexuality, Codependency, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disturbing Themes, Dubious Consent, Forced Medical Experimentation, General Depravity, High Chaos Corvo Attano, High Chaos Emily Kaldwin, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Multi, Older Man/Younger Woman, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parent/Child Incest, Serial Killers, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, The Corruption of Corvo Attano, Torture, Violent Thoughts, for real Dead Dove Do Not Eat I am extremely serious about that, void as lube
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2019-08-01 03:26:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 24
Words: 67,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16276910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Emily Kaldwin is on the throne, Dunwall is rebuilding, and Corvo Attano desperately wants to move on. Of course he can’t. Of course when he tries he finds himself moving in some absolutely horrifying directions.





	1. the clock is ticking

**Author's Note:**

> **ETA PRECEDING AUTHORIAL NOTE MONTHS LATER:** I'm now 25 chapters into this, and for those coming to it for the first time - whether out of genuine interest in Corvo/Emily or sheer morbid curiosity - I want to note a couple of things. 
> 
> A) Please read the warning tags. This gets fucked up (I mean of fucking course it does) especially in regard to violence, and with a few exceptions (see below) I'm not warning in individual chapters.
> 
> B) Any and all sex between Emily and Corvo will be 100% consensual. The non-con warning is not for them. Just in case that matters to you; it does to me.
> 
> C) One of the reasons why I'm writing this turns out to be not merely my desire to write some trash but also - and I talk more about this in subsequent notes and in conversations with readers in the comments - my interest in exploring just what exactly high chaos means for Corvo and his character development, and to a lesser extent Emily's and even the Outsider's. Because regardless of whether or not you think this particular pairing is at all plausible, the fact remains that by the end of the game, high chaos Corvo cannot possibly be anything but a monster incapable of reintegrating into regular healthy day-to-day life. Arkane themselves don't fully embrace the implications of this, but I wanted to. As the Outsider says at one point, high chaos Corvo Attano was reborn into a nightmare, and he doesn't want that nightmare to end, because that nightmare is the only place he truly feels at home. 
> 
> So while I'm taking this all pretty far, I actually do believe there's some solid basis in canon for it. At the very least I don't think you have to stretch very much to arrive at this point. 
> 
> The song kind of guiding this for me as well as the source of the title is [“Faded” by P.O.S.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4P5vVScnd1w) And probably it happened in the first place because of [this,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/725190) for which I’m grateful.
> 
> Thanks for reading and please do lemme know what you think. ❤️

   

> _I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my_  
>  _velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something’s not_  
>  _right about what I’m doing but I’m still doing it–_  
>  _living in the worst parts, ruining_ _myself. My inner life_  
>  _is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor_  
>  _I would keep falling. The enormity of my desire_  
>  _disgusts me. I kissed my mouth, it was no longer_  
>  _a mouth. I threw a spear at my head, I didn’t have_  
>  _a head. Fox. At the throat of. The territory is more_  
>  _complex than I supposed._
> 
> — Richard Siken, “Birds Hover Over the Trampled Field”

 

He wanted to believe he would lose his taste for death.

He doesn't pray. He didn't before the Void took him and he sure as hell doesn't now, but if he did, if he got down on his knees by his bedside every night and beseeched the powers of righteousness to bless his soul and keep him from dark paths, he might pray for that. Because he has to be good now. Because he can't be who he was, who—for a time—the world forced him to become. Surely he doesn't have to be that man anymore, anyway. Surely now the world is different and the forces it exerts on him will guide him in a new direction, toward a higher calling than murder.

For her, he must be better. For the sake of her integrity and her rule, he must be better than he was. Because for Emily’s part the people at large are accepting her—readily enough if not quite enthusiastically—but he'd be a damned fool if he wasn't well aware of the rumors swirling around the Royal Protector and new Spymaster, and how some of them are a good deal better established in the public consciousness than mere rumors. What he did, the lengths he went to. His _excesses_. They stop just short of calling them _crimes_.

He's used to rumors. But these are more of a threat than anything he caught flitting around regarding himself and Jessamine, because those were idle gossip of idle nobility but this…

The Royal Protector must be above suspicion, and he understands in the keenest possible way that in his case such a thing is impossible. It basically always has been.

But he has to be where he is. No one else can do what he can do, for her. Has done, will do, is _capable of_. So he believes he can be better because he must, and he stands at her side as she takes her place on a throne quite literally too big for her, and he watches her struggle to grow into it and he carries himself the way he's learned, the way he knows in his very bones, and every second is a new vow.

For her. Everything for her. He would give anything, _do_ anything. That's how it was. All that blood running through the gutters for her, all that gore painting his hands in her name. It had to be for something. It had to be _worth_ something, or else why did he do it?

Why else would he ever have done those things?

His hands are clean now, his fingernails carefully scrubbed. But he clenches them into fists and the mark on the back of his left burns. He considers wearing gloves and decides against it, and he's not altogether certain why.

The Heart is locked in a chest at foot of his bed. He doesn't talk to it anymore. He doesn't entirely recall what its voice sounded like.

~

He doesn't smoke, but for a couple of years before he left Karnaca he took it up. Dirty habit. He’s not ashamed of it but he doesn't miss it. But he never told anyone his reasons for doing so, which had their birth in his dreams.

Not every night, but consistently for several months, he would dream about it. He would be idling through the streets, wandering through alleys, and he would look down to see a half smoked cigar pinched deftly between two knuckles, as if he had been doing it all his life. The streets were oddly empty, and always dim with either twilight or dawn—he was never sure which. And although he never saw anyone, he could never escape the conviction that he was being watched, like fingertips gliding up the back of his neck. The weight of moth wings, and cool. Behind them and over his shoulder, constantly elusive, a smile like the curve of a sickle.

He would wake up shivering and lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. After weeks of this he lit up his first cigar and the dreams abruptly stopped, and they never returned.

He quit when he got to Dunwall. No one ever told him he should, but he sensed that it would be advisable and he’s never wondered whether or not he was correct. When Jessamine handed him one and offered her own to light it with, he never wondered about the correctness of that either.

Now he dreams of blood. Not every night, but more nights than he doesn't. It's two years since her reign began and all at once they wash in on him like a storm surge, and every night he walks through the streets and the rain cascades down red and sticky, trickling down walls and dripping from lampposts and trees and eaves, and when he opens his mouth he tastes sweet copper on his lips. Far from deserted, the city—Dunwall? Karnaca? He honestly can't tell, according to the logic of dreams it may be both at once—is choked with people. They seethe around him, their eyes wide with fear and their hands trembling. They clutch at each other, at him, chattering like birds. They're soaked in crimson and it distresses them. _Please,_ they moan. _Please don't. Please make it stop_.

How is he supposed to make it stop? It's the rain. He doesn't control it. The idea that he might is absurd.

He ducks under an awning and shields his eyes, chancing a look up. There are no storm clouds. The buildings rise up and up, thrusting themselves into the sky where they shatter. They're frozen in the moment at which they do, jagged spikes and scattered chunks of stone and wood. Beyond them is only blackness, and it glistens merrily like an eye.

He is being watched again.

He jerks awake to find himself already sitting up, his gaze locked on his spread hands. They're perfectly clean. He turns the left one over. For a while he thought the mark might fade but it looks darker than it did.

Might only be the moonlight. The drapes are partially open; he gets out of bed and goes to the window, pulls them back. Below him the city sprawls, the streets like canyons carved into the landscape by millennia’s worth of water, glowing here and there with the lights of reconstruction that continues long into the night. They have to hurry. There's no time to lose. Who knows when the next disaster will strike, but everyone is jumpy, as if they expect it to hit them anytime.

The city isn't what he would ever call _clean,_ but the sky above it is clear for once, a fresh wind from the sea sweeping away the clouds and smog, and the stars glitter.

Not like one eye. Like thousands.

~

The next time he wakes it's to discover himself already at the window with his blade in his hand. The ghost of fingertips at his nape send him into a wave of violent shudders, from which he recovers too slowly and which he tries—unsuccessfully—to forget as soon as possible. But it takes two more nights to even begin to suspect that he might be in trouble.

A fortnight after that to grasp the possibility that he might be fucked.


	2. give them a piece and they’ll take it all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo is visited - by the Outsider, by ghosts, by the past he can't escape and a looming, darkening future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I continue to not be totally sure where this is going, and I continue to let it do what it wants. So it’ll be a fun adventure for all of us. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. ❤️

When he knows he's in trouble: 

It's a dream, and as such it should be easy to dismiss. His dreams have always been odd things, and not only dreams of smoke or blood. Piercingly real, vivid as the edge of a knife, and as a boy waking into the warm Karnaca nights he would lie on the cusp between sleep and waking, sensing with mild bemusement that he was treading the edge of something and might tumble over either side. But that edge was a high place where he could see a great many things that were otherwise hidden to him. Their forms, outlines through the dust, like immense trees rising above the lower city. If only he was just a little closer. If only they were just a little clearer.

Then he fell and woke, and his mother was weeping softly in the next room, and he knew there would be no more sleep for him that night. 

When he knows he's in trouble he knows he's in a dream, and as such perhaps he should feel safe. The first time he was pulled into the Void he went in a slow sprawl, internal rather than literal, wrong-footed and tripping over his own perception and never quite recovering. Except at some point the falling stopped feeling like falling, and the first time he stretched out his burning hand and almost instantly _there_ became _here,_ what stunned him was how natural it felt. How he Blinked through the Void from fragment to fragment of the world as easy as thought. He barely aimed. He looked at where he wanted to be and he was there, and the rune was cool and slick against his palm, and the eyes of the Outsider were oil slicks in the light of dead stars.

Possibly he knew he was in trouble then. Because it felt too natural. Because no one should feel at home in the Void—and he didn't, that's not what it was, but it was… 

Closer to that than it should have been. Than he should have been. 

Very close. 

But he thought he might not go back there. He thought he might have been finished with it, watching dawn break over Kingsparrow Island and wiping his blade on his thigh. Looking at her. He left bloody smears on the shoulder of her blouse and didn't allow himself to wonder why he didn't feel bad about it. It didn't matter. He was done. It was done. 

The mark, though. The mark refused to fade, so really this is only what he should have expected. 

Back there now, perched on a streetlight rooted in a street that doesn't exist. A few yards away from him floats a model of Dunwall Tower made, in his estimation, to one/twenty-fourth scale. 

It might not be a model. It might be the real thing. 

Someone has jumped from a high balcony. She's frozen in mid-plunge, arms and legs akimbo, her long hair coming loose from its knot and her plain clothing rippling in the nonexistent wind. She's tiny but he can see her face, can see the way it's contorted with terror. She either didn't want to jump or she's regretting the decision. 

He doesn't recognize her. 

 _Oh, really?_ The Outsider’s purr is cool velvet in his ear. _Are you sure? Look closer. When it comes to lives and the taking of them, we must be certain about such things._

Corvo stiffens and doesn't turn. He won't show that he's startled, but he is. The Outsider has no sense of presence, no weight; he doesn't displace the air around him, and as far as Corvo was ever able to determine, he doesn't breathe. No body heat, no pulse. He's nothingness with a face, starless black where his eyes should be, but his voice has all the density and texture that the rest of him lacks. 

 _Do I?_ Amusement like the slow blink of a pleased cat. _And how exactly would you know that, Corvo? How close did I get to you, when I marked you?_

Close now. Corvo exhales—heavily, as if for both of them. _What do you want?_  

In the Void, they speak and don't speak at the same time. He's positive his lips move but his vocal cords are still. 

 _Two years away and this is how you greet me._ The Outsider sounds hurt, and beneath it the amusement only arches its back with feline gratification. _Restoration at Court has apparently not restored your manners. Didn't I help you? Didn't I give you my favor?_ Corvo closes his eyes, and when he opens them they're standing together on the balcony from which the woman jumped. Corvo stares at her and a muscle in his temple twitches; she's not far, and if he leaned out over the edge and reached for her—

Beside him, the Outsider shakes his head. _You can't. I won't prevent you from trying, but you wouldn't be able to budge her. She's locked into the air. In time. This—_ He waves a hand as slender and pale as the antlers of a Tyvian gazelle. — _is a single moment. One out of hundreds of thousands. In its way, no more remarkable than any of the others._  

Corvo’s mouth tightens. _She’s going to die._

 _Yes, she is. So are you. So are we all. So did I, once, but that's a whole other story. Remind me and I'll tell it to you sometime._ The Outsider steps to the railing. One feels rather than sees the direction of his focus, and for the moment Corvo can't feel a thing. _I say this moment in her life—toward its end—is no more remarkable than the others, but in fact it exists adjacent to one that is. The moment when she made a choice that changed everything._ He turns and spreads his arms. _There are crossroads in time when we go one way and not another, and those choices define us. How we live. How we die. You know that better than most. But everyone learns it in time._  

This is unfair. This is a game where the odds are stacked against him, and Corvo can't discern precisely how, and that's uncomfortable on its own special level. He doesn't want to be here. He never wanted to be here again. He never wanted to remember how it felt. _Why are you showing this to me?_ He hesitates as a ripple of unease rolls down his spine. _Answer my question, from before. Do I know her? Should I?_  

 _You? No. She was a chambermaid who caught the eye of a lord, who… misused her. His high position in the old Emperor’s court made him untouchable, though there were rumors in abundance. If you could see under her blouse, her breeches, you would see the way he marked her. She couldn't shed her skin, but as you might have noticed, she did shed her uniform in her last moments of life. You see, she was going to go out on what terms she could._ He points. _Her body, which he so abused? She wanted to break it against the ground. Else she might have taken poison, or hanged herself, or cut her wrists. That destruction wasn't sufficient for her. If she could have given herself to the rats she would._  

Corvo releases a breath, and it deflates him. This is all deflating, and he wants very much to look away. _That’s no answer. Why show me?_ A sudden strange impulse: he Blinks across the space between them and finds himself closer than he meant to be, bringing them nearly chest to chest, abruptly aware in a way he wasn't before of the height differential. Of how the Outsider is shorter, slighter, and yet so near to him like this, Corvo feels small. Whatever intimidation he's attempting is foolish. But he struggles not to back down. _You like games, I know. I'm tired of playing them._  

The Outsider folds his arms, tilts his head, and although no light touches his eyes, they seem to glitter. For a time he says nothing, and Corvo is filled with the unsettling conviction that he's _enjoying_ this. The pointless intimidation.

The closeness. 

Finally: _I told you that you knew what it was to make the choice of a moment, to come to the crossroads and go one way. Irrecoverable._ His lips curve. _Irredeemable. You can't go back. Admit it—you don't even want to. You want more. Look at your hands, Corvo. Look at them and see._

He doesn't want to. He does. Red, hot and wet and dripping to his wrists. Like he's thrust them into a cracked chest to tear free the heart.

Whispering to him in the dark as the gears sadly grind. _You cannot save her. You cannot save anyone. You never could._  

The Outsider pushes up on his toes, lips twitching _. I gave you the gift of that choice because you were… interesting. Because I saw you at the crossroads of not only your own life but many. The life of an empire. The course of history. You didn't disappoint me._ The weight of the Outsider’s pale hand over his breastbone is like lead. _I'm not done with you, Corvo. I suspect there's more than one crossroads for you yet. And what road, I wonder, will you choose?_  

Corvo is about to knock that hand away, shove that slender form back, but it's gone. Everything is gone. Everything but the blue-black sky enclosing him on all sides, and a searing light ahead, and between him and it, like a living hole in the Void itself… 

Her bare shoulders, the graceful dip of her clavicles, the inverted curve of her waist and the swell of her hips, her strong thighs—he saw these things. That first night. Saw them and when she opened to him, he fell into her. Hot and wet as blood.

 _Come here. Come to me._  

Is it her, though? Is it really? Is he sure?

Who else could it be? 

The light swallows him. 

~ 

In the life he lost to Daud’s blade, he used to wander the streets at night. Not with much in the way of the acrobatics he now employs, though he scaled his share of pipes and darted across his share of rooftops. But then, while he tried to ignore the whispers and conduct himself according to a station he'd never dreamed of or asked for, there was another life even before that from which he never was able to free himself. Nights on the street in Karnaca. Spices, cigar smoke, strummed guitars, and the way his young feet devoured the cobblestones. He was restless in those days, and he never stopped being so, and even as the Lord Protector the night called to him and he had to answer.

She didn't know. He doesn't think. Jessamine was aware that there were nights when he was neither in his own bed nor hers, but this was a part of himself he largely kept even from her. 

Not out of shame. Not because he was afraid she might not understand. He's not certain why he did.

 _This is not my city._ Echoing in his mind like a refrain, lyrics that get caught in the spiral of the ear and never find their way out. Thinking it, making his silent way through the shadows. He melted into it, moved smoothly through it, but he was not _of_ it and he never would be. 

His lover sat on the throne. Now, his child. He was bedmate to an empress, is father to the same, but this is _still_ not his city, and he flickers through the foggy night like a candle flame. Days watching over Emily at her lessons. Days observing her governess, her chambermaids, keeping out of the way but never leaving, never quite trusting. It occurs to him that repeated betrayal has marked him too, changed him in ways no one else can see—and _she_ might see. 

Sometimes she looks at him and he's almost certain she does. 

Sometimes he looks at her and he can almost see the same mark. 

In the night, in the streets, bending time for the dark joy of it. He walks among them, sword in hand, and he reflects on how easy it would be to drive that sword through any of their hearts and be gone before anyone realized murder had been done. Through pubs and bawdy-houses, down alleys and lanes, through the drained Flooded District and the Rust District and at the Waterfront docks, the stench of blubber and blood and the musk of ambergris—a chorus of chattering voices, gossip, harsh laughter. He listens. As a shadow, he listens. As a rat, he listens. Considers faces and names. Makes mental notes of the ones saying things he doesn't much like. 

 _She's young, isn't she? Too young. Girl that small shouldn't take no throne, perhaps a Lord Regent wasn't such a bad idea after all. By the Void, she might start a war on account of someone makes supper the way she don't like, or breaks her favorite toy. And that Lord Protector always hoverin’ over her. Foreign man, and they do say how he was a common street rat in his younger days. Don't like the look of ‘im. Never did. Not when he was with the old Empress, truth be told, though spirits rest her soul. They was always too cozy. Weren’t decent, if you ask me._  

No one did, old man. 

Snake-tongued piece of shit. 

 _Now everyone knows where_ Empress Emily _came from, don't they? Outsider only knows what's in her blood, da’ like that, and her born of some secret tryst._  

 _Outsider only knows what he's been teachin’ her._  

His hands itch and tremble. They feel too dry. Back in his chambers he rubs perfumed oil into them, and hates the smell and washes them again. He slips once more into the form of a rat and crawls through the vents into Emily’s room, climbs a bookcase and watches her for a while. She turns over in her sleep, again and again, muttering things he can't understand, her brow furrowed and her mouth tight. 

She's twelve years old and she's not remotely a child.

He feels better, watching her. After an hour or so he returns to his bed and collapses into an exhausted sleep, broken too soon by dawn. 

~

When he knows he's fucked: 

He's fucking _her_. Part of him would think it was crude to use such a word to describe what happened, but it's what it was, and a bigger part of him, the rough child of Karnaca who became a rough man of Dunwall—though never truly _of_ it, not him, not ever—reveled in the word and the act. Of course it started slow—started long before that night, as such things often do: glances, turns of phrase, a blush hidden by a handkerchief and a hurriedly turned shoulder, and he was the shy one and she was far less so, the brush of fingertips when he gave her messages and teacups, and when she settled that small soft hand of hers into his cupped palm and he escorted her down the grand staircase to yet another imperial ball, her fingers lingered longer than they needed to. 

They both knew. They couldn't not know. 

They were waiting for something. 

The worst storm of the Month of Nets. The crash of thunder that night, the lighting a brilliant sword stabbing into the ground, and the lights of a third of the city snapped out when she curled her small soft hand around his neck and pulled him in, her mouth sealed over his. He stiffened. Then he arched into it, raked his hands into her hair and clumsily loosed it to cascade dark and glossy over her shoulders. They were alone in her chambers, which was happening frequently by then. Already there was hushed gossip of scandal. He suspected she liked that, that there was some thread of perversity woven into the fabric of her, and she stripped off his clothes faster than he could remove hers, kept her corset on as she shoved him back onto her bed and slung a thigh over his hips, straddled him. 

 _Obey her. Obey your Empress_. 

He hears it like a dry whisper in his ear. Her hand is small and soft but it's also hot and strong when she takes his cock and sinks down onto it, her head thrown back and her mouth wide. He wondered if it was her first time and then couldn't wonder anything at all as she braced herself against his chest and rode him, panting, so beautiful and wild he couldn't breathe. So tight when she clenched herself— _clenches_ herself around him and it's nearly pain, and all he can do is grip her by the hips and lock his groans behind his teeth.

In truth, she was fucking him every bit as much as he was fucking her. He never would have expected anything else. 

Her curves lit up sharp by another crack of light. Her graceful throat. Her breasts heavy in his palms. The wet heat of her cunt. He remembers these things. He never left that night and now he returns there. What was is now and it always will be, because he's cursed. 

All he wanted since he laid eyes on her was to serve her, in every way he could.

All around him, everywhere, rumbling like the thunder, someone is laughing. 

 _Stop,_ he's gasping, groping at her, because he _can't_ , apparently he can bed her but there must be _some_ limits, some things he can't do—though of course he'll turn out to be as wrong about that as he possibly can be. _Stop, Jessamine, please, I'm close, I’m—_  

She wrenches herself off him and falls back, working furiously at herself with her fingers and keening as she sends herself flying over the edge, and he watches her, awed and for an instant forgetting himself entirely, until once more a hand is closing around his shaft and jerking hard and fast. 

Not soft, though smooth. Stronger than hers ever was. 

Cool.

He stares up with wide eyes, already starting to shudder with the thick pleasure pulsing through him and spilling slick onto his belly, and an oil-slick gaze meets his. 

 _Come then, Corvo. Lovely black bird. Come for me. Obey._  

 _Like you always have._  

The lightning strobes into the room. The Outsider looms over him and drags him through his climax and past it until he's practically sobbing, and doesn't let him go, and doesn't stop laughing.

~

He wakes up shivering. The sheets around him are drenched with sweat—and not only that. He sits bolt upright and looks down and his hand is glistening. Lightning flashes and thunder slams the tower, seems to shatter itself against the windowpanes, and in the seconds before he understands what he's seeing, he'd swear the shining fluid smeared across his fingers is black. 

As, in this kind of light, blood always is. 

He tastes sweet copper on his tongue.

 


	3. what I choose is my choice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Breaking on a wave of insomnia, Corvo creeps into the safe room and remembers the night he painted the Tower walls red. Of course he's not the only one wandering sleepless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ❤️

A week of no dreams. On the seventh night sleep doesn't come for him at all, and he pulls on his dressing gown and unlocks the chest at the foot of his bed—the bed too big, too empty, he should be accustomed to sleeping alone by now—and removes the Heart.

He crouches, cradles it in his hands. As always, it's faintly warm and faintly pulsing; a flutter rather than a beat, as if a sparrow is trapped behind the tiny glass window, trying frantically to escape the gears.

After all this time, it lives. He would have been shocked if it didn't.

But it's silent.

He gives it a gentle squeeze. Nothing. A little less gentle, and immediately hates himself for it. Jessamine never minded when he got rough with her in bed, even encouraged it with decided enthusiasm, and if anything that's why this feels so horribly wrong now. As if he's already done her a great hurt, without her consent, and might hurt her worse.

_Didn’t you, Corvo? Isn't that exactly what you did?_

He bows his head and releases all the air in his lungs, until he thinks he might crumple inward like a balloon. Then he fills himself again, gets slowly to his feet, opens the door to his chambers and pads into the hall.

Rich carpet on the glossy wood floor, soft under the balls of his bare feet; he didn't bother with slippers. He’s always very quiet no matter what he’s wearing—makes the servants jumpy even when he's not trying, constantly looking over their shoulders and watching what they say—but now he's as silent as the Heart, slinking through the shadows like a cat.

Not a rat. Rats scuffle and rustle. He's known for a long time that he's something much worse.

He could mark the steps by count alone; he could find this spot in the pitch black with no aid of witchcraft. He halts and turns, reaches up to the lenses, closes his fingers around their smooth slickness and turns them sideways.

He remembers the first time Jessamine brought him here. It was years before that first night between them—he can no longer place the precise year, but she couldn't have been older than fourteen, and he practically still a boy himself. She gave him no preamble, no indication of what she was about to show him. She simply took his hand and led him down the hall, and when the rear of the fireplace ground upward, she bent her graceful back and led him through the door she made.

It took him a while after that to fully understand what she had done that day. What she had allowed him to possess.

She already trusted him. She had to; he was quite literally charged with the keeping of her life. But this was something more. This was a secret, and the secret was an invitation that she herself was perhaps not completely aware she had given.

He definitely wasn't aware. And he wouldn't answer it until years later.

Now he stands and watches the secret reveal itself again. The electric shimmer that illumates the hall doesn't touch this particular corner, and the stone is pale in a shaft of moonlight, the raising panel like an opening mouth. The space beyond appears lost in darkness, and when he crouches to pass through, he has to fumble for the switch on the far side.

But his eyes adjust almost immediately to the dimness. The small chamber lit only by a single narrow window, spiderweb frames of frosted glass, the moonlight muffled into a soft glow. The desk, the chair, bookshelves, another door near the far wall that can only be opened with the ring he wears.

Looking at the door, he rubs his thumb across the band. It's unnaturally cool.

The day it was returned to him. The day of Emily’s coronation, when he accepted it from her hand. He could have sworn it burned him then. Part of him wished it did.

She knows about this place. She knows all about how to get here, about what’s beyond the door, about how to use it in time of need. But she never comes here, he's almost certain. It may simply not occur to her, but he knows better; she's a lover of both exploring and intrigues, and must know nearly every secret compartment and passage in the entire Tower, perhaps even some he's not aware of.

If Emily doesn't come here, it's because she doesn't want to.

The Heart held in one hand, he pulls the chair back from the desk and sinks into it, staring down at the sad nightmare of glass and metal and flesh.

It would be a bad joke to say that it's all he has left of Jessamine. Jessamine is everywhere. Jessamine Kaldwin is in every stone of the Tower, every fiber of every rug and tapestry, every grain of wood, every gleaming lens. The light, the dark, the sigh of the wind. Every direction he turns, he sees her. She's relentless. There's no escape.

He doesn't foresee any of this ever getting better.

 _Especially not if_ she _continues growing as she is,_ purrs a voice behind him, that chilly puff of air against his nape. Chill as the Void. _You already see so much of her mother in her. She is now the age her mother was when you first laid eyes on her. On the girl who became a woman and became your love. She was a child to you then, yes. But she grew up and things changed._

_Terrible things have small beginnings, Lord Protector. A pebble tumbling down just the wrong slope will become the avalanche that crushes an entire town._

Corvo shakes his head as if he can dislodge the sound, but it lingers, an echo through the passages of his skull. He bows his head, his fingers tracing the bands of steel that wind around the Heart, the warm velvety texture of dried muscle. It's an obscenity, it always has been, and he doesn't want to love such a thing, and he does.

_Talk to me. Say something._

_Say_ anything _._

Everything in this room, he realizes, is exactly as he left it the night he killed Burrows. The night he killed everyone. Or so it seemed. That night, he made Dunwall Tower a charnel house. He waded through the halls on a tide of blood. He cut screams to ribbons before they could grow to more then whispers. He left the servants alive, but at the time it didn't feel like mercy so much as calculus. No one else made it out still breathing. None of them deserved to live. They made their choice. Traitors, all.

_We all made our choices._

He could have done it quickly, eased up to Burrows’s bedroom and cut him down before anyone knew he was there, made an escape with no more blood shed. Instead he did it as slowly as possible, and he took pains to ensure that every single guard in the Tower knew he was coming.

Sometimes vengeance calls for subtlety. And sometimes subtlety can't hope to satisfy.

But somewhere in all that carnage, before he cut Burrows’s heart out of his worthless chest, he turned the lenses and crept in here, and oddly, it's the clearest memory he retains of that entire night.

Sitting where he is now. Panting, blood-reeking. It was everywhere. It was dripping off his sword, his hands. He tasted it on his lips. The sheen of it on the Heart, black on flesh and red on metal. Nameless blood. Faceless corpses swallowed by rats. The men he murdered could have been anyone. It never mattered.

It never fucking mattered.

He came in here. The audiograph. Jessamine’s voice—more a ghost in that machine than the Heart could ever be. He knows he must have listened but he can't remember what she said.

The message wasn't even for him.

He looks past the Heart and down. There's a fine layer of dust under his feet, on everything. No one has come in here to clean. No one would know to do so. The floor is spattered and spotted. Near the fireplace, the smear of half a bootprint.

The Heart stirs. He doesn’t squeeze to summon it but it does anyway. Part of him almost screams. Part of him is cold and solid as the stone, and has in fact been expecting this. The message he found that day wasn't for him, but this one will be.

And now he realizes that he almost dreads to hear it.

 _My love._ A pause that seems to stretch out into a cold and bleak forever. _I see the blood on your hands. On your lips. You will never wash it away, no matter how hard you try. You will never erase the curse scrawled across the inner walls of your mind. You will never put back to sleep what you awakened when you took the Mark. When you took him into yourself. Into your body. Into your heart. You could have chosen life. Mercy. Love. You didn't. You chose something else. You thought that when it was over, you could go back to the man you were before it all went wrong. You could be someone better and forget what you became._

_You could forget how much you liked it._

Her voice is choked, agonized, as if he's crushing her. Perhaps he is. Perhaps he could hurl her to the floor and grind her into paste and scrap metal and shattered glass beneath his heel. He stares into nothing and he can't fill his lungs.

_Just what is it that you truly lust for? What do you ache for, in your very bones?_

_I fear so much that someday soon you will know._

~

The rumble of the fireplace closing behind him, and Emily’s eyes shining in the half light.

He stands where he is, staring at her. At first he isn't even certain who she is. He'd know her footstep in the pitch dark, the hiss of her breath, but now somehow, in an awful fraction of a moment, he's no longer certain. She's not tall but she's growing fast, her face beginning to lose its childish plumpness and taking on the more slender lines of adulthood, and in fact now and then it faintly alarms him, how rapidly it's happening. So now he sees her and he barely knows her, but he _does_ know what he's seeing, that face and those eyes so horribly familiar.

He is nineteen, excited by a new world but struggling to adapt to the cooler air and the overcast skies, dark wood and slate gray instead of pale stucco and red tile, and trying not to let on. He feels perennially out of place and wonders if that’ll ever change. He thought someone would point him toward a specific purpose and so far no one has; there's a sword at his side and the knowledge of its use in his mind and muscles but no direction in which to wield it. He misses his mother. His sister. His father, even after all this time. He's without a family, without a place, without a home.

But he sees her, this girl with strange, old eyes, and he takes her offered hand and everything changes.

“Father?”

She doesn't always call him that, even now. It jars him slightly every time she does, and he can't pin down why. Isn't it true? Why should his name on her lips sound better to him? He gives her a nod and says nothing else—and is seized by an instant of distant panic until he realizes that he's tucked the Heart into a fold of his dressing gown, and unless she inspects him closely it shouldn't be too visible.

In fact most people never seemed to see it at all. But he's not confident that she would be one of them.

She looks past him at the fireplace. Of course she doesn't have to ask where he was, and she won't ask him why he was there or what he was doing, but she does have another question.

“Can't sleep?”

He shakes his head.

“Neither can I.” She sighs. “I haven't been able to for a few nights now.”

“Bad dreams?”

“I.” She hesitates. “I don't know if they're bad or not. I don't like them. There's a man in them. He has black eyes. He wants something but he won't tell me what.” Her voice drops almost to a whisper. “I dreamed about him when we were living at the Hound Pits. He never said anything, he just came and watched me. Sometimes he was smiling.”

Water in Corvo’s bones. He knew. Went into Emily’s tower once to say goodnight and she was already sleeping, and before Callista chased him out he heard her fitful sleep talk and there was no mistaking it.

The cold rage he felt then. Because how dare he. Black-eyed bastard, _how fucking dare he._

The Outsider dares because he dares everything. Because for him, there's no line too far to cross.

“Do you dream?”

He shakes himself slightly. “Sometimes. They're—” All at once he's having difficulty meeting her eyes. “Most of the time I don't remember them.”

She ducks her head, appearing to mull this over, and he steps close and lays a hand on her shoulder, giving her a squeeze. “They're just dreams. They don't mean anything. C’mon, now.” He turns her gently in the direction of her rooms. “You should go on back to bed.”

She tenses a second or two, but it's the only resistance she puts up. Then she's walking with him, padding down the hall as quietly as he is, and she slips her hand into his. It's small and cool, and once again it's as if the world folds in half and he's Blinked not in space but in time.

For a fraction of a second, wild disorientation. Then he's solid again, and he weaves his fingers through hers. He knows who she is. He's always known.

He tucks her into bed—something she might ordinarily balk at, a thing for small children and babies, but now she accepts it without protest, and just as he's rising to turn out the light and go, she catches his sleeve and gazes up at him with solemn eyes.

“Stay? Just until I fall asleep?”

He does. Sits at the side of her bed and watches her features relax, and finally he brushes a strand of hair away from her cheek with careful fingers, teeth closing on the edge of his tongue.

If he could take his sword and carve a mark on her headboard to keep the monster away, he would. If he could use up all his witchcraft to guard her sleep and be left with nothing for himself, he would do it in a second. If he could take a man’s blood and paint the sharp angles and slashes, the treacherous curves of just the right rune, he would do so without hesitation—he considers this with heated ferocity, how easy it would be to make someone die for her, how easy it's always been.

How she might make an excellent excuse.

Back in his own room he once more locks the Heart away. If he hears it whisper to him, he doesn't make out what it says. He straightens up and closes his eyes, and when he opens them he's at his window, the sash pushed up and his blade clutched in his hand, every part of him quivering.

The taste of blood on his lips.

_What is it that you truly lust for?_

He folds the blade, a single whipcrack motion. Tosses the dressing gown onto a chair and climbs into bed, pushes the blade under his pillow, again shuts his eyes with all determination. It's over. He no longer has to be what, for a while, he had to become. He might have to kill in her service, but he doesn't have to be a killer.

He can be better.

His dreams are full of splashed red and screaming. Living flesh is unmade before him, tangled guts spilled onto stone. He remembers every second.

Every single delightful second.


	4. it's too late to change events

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Corvo can dream again, he dreams of Dunwall soaked in blood - and an old nightmare rears its head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're here in spite of the tags I feel like you're already at least somewhat aware of what you're in for, but let me reiterate at this point that there is and will be some effed up shit in here. I think it really is properly a Dead Dove fic. So yeah. 
> 
> I'm noticing a lot of similarities in tone and theme between this fic and [my other Dishonored Corvo the Black WIP,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16640606) and I think they can be read almost as companions, though that one is not Corvo/Emily. Basically I feel like just about everything I write in this fandom is likely to slip in one way or another toward The Corruption of Corvo Attano. Which I assume no one remotely has a problem with. :D
> 
> ❤️

For a month after that, he can almost believe he's all right.

The Heart is quiet in its locked chest. His sword remains folded; when he fences to keep his hand in, he borrows one from the Tower Guard’s armory. It's a lazy, thoughtless thing, this fencing—and in fact he'd barely call it that, it commands so little of his focus. In an attempt to make it more engaging, he doesn't allow himself the advantage of witchcraft—which seems wise anyway, although he avoids Overseers even now and he takes particular care to see that, if for some reason any have been allowed behind the Tower walls, they're never in the courtyard where he practices. In any case it really wouldn't do to let anyone see what he's capable of. 

Not when there are already plenty of rumors. 

So it's just him, everything he's learned from a lifetime of fighting, a sword, and the worthiest opponent he can find. But the worthiest proves to be no match for even a restrained version of himself, and every time he ends up dismissing them and turning away and walking alone to the edge of the parapet, bracing himself against the stone. He breathes hard. It's not from exertion. 

His hands no longer itch but that itch slithered into his veins, and he can't hope to scratch it. Not this way. 

Nevertheless, he believes he's all right. 

Almost.

A month. Several months. A year. Twice in that time he has to draw his sword in earnest—once during a military review when a man with a long knife and wild eyes breaks through the line of City Watch, and once at the launch of a ship when a blond woman wearing a brilliant red robe bows low as Emily passes, only to straighten up with a pistol in her hand.

The man is a lunatic. The woman is a Morleyan extremist. Neither of their deaths disrupts his sleep afterward. He detects no indication that Emily is particularly troubled either. 

But in all honesty—and he _is_ still capable of that, now and then—his sleep is another matter entirely. 

~ 

 _Dreams are only dreams._  

In the days and weeks after his father never came home, he frequently heard that phrase. He heard it from his mother. He would wake up screaming and tangled in the sheets, twisting so violently that he nearly tumbled out of his narrow bed and onto the floor, and she would be bending over him with a lamp in her hand and the distress evident on her face. She'd try to hide it, once he regained a little control over himself; she must have felt like it was her obligation to comfort him. He might have resented that. He wasn't a damn infant. But he lay there and let her stroke his hair, tell him that dreams were only dreams and when he woke up they couldn't follow him. 

He never managed to tell her what the dreams were _of_. His father standing with his saw in his hand, oblivious to the log come loose from its straps and tumbling toward him. Of course Corvo couldn't run to him, couldn't shout; the nightmare logic was perfectly consistent every time, and every time Corvo had to watch as the log crushed his father into the mill’s concrete floor, shattered his legs and punched his ribs through his skin and jetted a soup of blood and bile from his mouth before his skull was mashed into paste. The long reddish smear left behind. 

There was a reason why they weren't allowed to open the casket at the funeral. 

 _Dreams are only dreams._ Except they weren't. It happened. He hadn't been there for it, it wasn't his fault in any case, but it still happened. The resulting absence wasn't anything he could ever escape from. 

The Void wasn't following him into the waking world. He was only carrying back out what he had carried in. 

It was a fucking lie. But he tells it to himself now. He has to. Many nights he can't recall his dreams at all, but then there are the nights he can, and oh, the _blood_ , the wonderful sweet tide of blood. It spills from his hands. His sword cracks the dam and lets it pour through. It washes through the filthy streets of Dunwall and toward the sea and the cries of the whales, and in its wake he flows like a shadow made of oil, escorted by fat swarms of rats.

Smooth cold undulating against his thrumming body like a serpent. Teeth scraping his throat. Pleased laughter in his ears. 

They're only dreams. He leaves it all behind in the glow of morning above the glass of his bedroom ceiling. He doesn't carry any of it out with him. He certainly never carried any of it in.

But stars, he itches. He's so achingly dry. 

~ 

Her thirteenth year. Everything proceeds as it has. Her tutoring and courtly training will continue for a few years more yet, and of course she'll be subject to lessons of one form or another for the rest of her life. But on the occasion of her thirteenth birthday he paces the edges of the ballroom and finds himself watching her as she dances awkwardly with the youngest son of one of the nobler families—a tow-headed boy all gangly arms and big feet—and one of those dreams crawls out of the Void in his mind and into the brighter light just behind his eyes and begins to act itself out like a play unfolding on an inner stage.

The boy presses closer; more of his clumsiness than genuine forwardness or cheek. Emily glances up at him, discomfited, but she doesn't immediately attempt to restore the distance between them, and that's when the blade flashes in his hand, too well concealed by their bodies for anyone but Corvo to spot, and it flicks back and plunges into her gut before he can get halfway across the room and she crumples with blood bubbling from her lips—

Twice now, would-be assassins have gotten closer to her than they honestly should have. They were clumsy and stupid and it wasn't difficult to take them down; he didn't even have to slow time to make certain of stopping them, and Emily was never in any real danger. But they did get close. So many people get close to her, every day. Maids and butlers and tutors and governesses, cooks and scullery girls, guards and soldiers and sailors. Nobles and even Overseers. She's the Empress. At all times, she's surrounded.

And for his part, for all his magic, he can't be everywhere at once. 

 _Kill everyone, then. Everyone who comes near her—slaughter them. Chart the simplest course. Show no mercy; take no risks. Any business they have with her can be conducted at a distance. Otherwise, kill them. Kill this boy. Kill his preening, stuck-up mother. Kill his genteel inbred cousins. Kill them all. Paint the walls with blood and watch the rats eat their eyes._  

 _Show her what you'll do, for the love of her._  

He doesn't. But he watches her and the boy and he thinks about what it might be like to do it.

She looks bored. She clearly doesn't want to be here; she's doing what she knows is expected of her, bowing when the music stops and everyone politely applauds, but her heart isn't in it and her mind must be miles away. He spies the distance behind her eyes. Remembers her years ago, dancing among the rocks near the water lock and swinging a stick she pretended into being a sword. The only kind of dancing he imagines she'd love. 

He can't be everywhere at once. So the seed of an idea settles into his brain, and over the rest of the year it spreads its roots. 

The year itself is quiet. Until it isn't anymore. 

~ 

Two months before Emily’s fourteenth birthday, there's an outbreak of plague in the Old Port district. Not entirely unexpected—there have been three other outbreaks since the plague was beaten back—but those others were small and easily contained, and this one is proving more difficult. The city officials who come to her office to deliver their reports are worried. The numbers of the sick rise steadily over the course of a fortnight: twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred. The numbers of the dead begin to rise as well. Conventional treatments, always effective until now, seem to no longer be working as they have before, when they work at all. Even more than the sickness, people are frightened; Corvo stands beside Emily and feels the alarm come off her in waves like heat as it's explained to her—that if people are driven by terror to flee, and they happen to be carrying the plague themselves, it may rapidly become impossible to contain. 

They don't spell out what they believe should be done. Everyone remembers. 

 _The boldest measures are the safest._  

Well? Are they? 

After one of these reports—the most dire yet—the door clicks shut behind the departing officials and Emily practically launches out of the chair and shoves herself away from the desk, wraps her arms around his waist and buries her face in his chest and clings to him. She's not sobbing but she's trembling everywhere, every muscle, and he doesn't have to ask her to know why. 

She saw so much. It's easy to forget how much she saw. Mountains of shrouded bodies. Not all of them even dead. Summary executions in the street. People sizzling into ashes in the Walls of Light. Weepers staggering through reeking alleys. Rats. So many rats. 

 _Your rats, Lord Protector. Your army._  

 _Burrows set them loose. You directed them to kill._  

He shakes himself. It wasn't like that. It was a tool; that's all. Nothing more. 

“I can't do it again,” she breathes as he strokes her hair, and she lifts her head and stares up at him. She’s looking less and less like a child every day, but now it's all come rushing back in and it knocks him off-balance. “Don't let it happen again, Father, I can't, I _can't_ …” 

“You won't.” He holds her closer and rests his cheek against the crown of her head. This is something he can do. He can find a way. “It won't come to that. I swear.”

Whatever it takes. Anything. 

~ 

So he visits Sokolov.

He hasn’t seen the man since Emily’s last birthday. Sokolov was there, of course—Piero as well, but Piero stood apart, and while it would be both easy and reasonable to chalk that up to Piero’s essential weirdness and his blatant discomfort with crowds… It was clear that it was more than that. The furtive glances. The way his back was always mostly turned. The shadowy corners he kept melting into. The way he spoke to no one, not even Sokolov, and then disappeared as soon as he could do so without arousing comment.

Whatever was going on, Corvo didn't ask. In truth, he didn't much care to know. He had other things to do, and Piero’s oddities were his business. 

In any case, stars willing, his involvement here won't be necessary. 

To the surprise of some, Sokolov returned to his house on Kaldwin’s Bridge, offering—though no one asked for it—the justification that he could work most easily in a lab with which he's intimately familiar, and he has most of what he’ll need already there. There was no reason to stop him from making a home wherever he damn well pleased; Corvo let him go with a distracted wave of the hand. But now Corvo is here, climbing the staircase he once crept up, walking over the carpet he once stained with blood—and the bloodstains are still there. Faded but unmistakable, and more splashed against a painting, looking almost as if they're blended with the oils, as if they've always been there. It's a slaughterhouse scene, and the droplets are brown-red against the pale hide of a dead whale, near where the whalers are slashing it open. The rest is more brown and gray and odd, diffuse light. Light he's seen before. 

He only realizes that he's stopped to stare at it when he's been there for some time.

One of the Watch is standing at the end of the hall, hand on her gun, and when Corvo meets her eyes they flicker. For an instant, hatred so violent it's like a physical force. He carefully cleaned out the ranks once he was safely able to do so, and he doesn't often run into this kind of thing, but it does happen from time to time. It occurs to him to wonder, as he passes her without so much as a nod: did he kill a comrade of hers? A friend? Perhaps a sibling? Does she have a specific reason to hate him so much, or is it merely everything he did to the Watch in general?

He considers these possibilities with no particular emotion. They're possible; he has to admit that. Otherwise they're of no consequence. 

Unless she makes herself a problem. In which case he’ll deal with her.

It's close to dusk, and the lamps in the laboratory above the bedroom are lit, casting ghostly reflections against the walls and ceiling of glass. Sokolov bends over his worktable, magnifying lens pressed nearly to his eye, using a scalpel to prod something Corvo can't see. He hears Corvo enter, it's obvious by the sudden tension in his back and shoulders, but he doesn't look up, and his hands continue to move, even when Corvo stops just behind him. 

It's a rat, of course. Vivisected and still twitching with its chest and belly pinned open, the wood beneath it dark with gore.

Corvo clears his throat. “Not sure the Academy would approve.” 

“Fuck the Academy.” This sentiment isn't remotely unexpected and strikes Corvo as eminently reasonable. “There's a reason they were never able to produce a cure.” 

“And you can. You can do it again.” 

Sokolov raises his head, scowling. Also unexpected; Corvo has never known Sokolov to not scowl, even when he smiles. “I told you I can and I can. It's a question of time.” 

Corvo looks past him and at the broad wall of glass, the slitted shutters and the city beyond. This evening he traveled through it by carriage—which felt utterly wrong. He would have preferred to reach it by the rooftops and the alleys, sneaking even where he didn't have to, and halfway between the Tower and the bridge he understood that this is never going to be a comfortable balance of roles. He's father to the Empress, Protector and Spymaster and therefore a statesman of sorts, but he's also… 

He's also something else. 

Before, it was uncomfortable for a host of other reasons. But now somehow it's worse. 

“I don't know how much time Dunwall has,” Corvo says quietly, and Sokolov seems to slump like the dead-eyed people in the streets. It's only a fraction of a second, easy to miss, but Corvo doesn't miss anything anymore. No matter whether or not he'd like to. 

“The work would likely go faster,” Sokolov says, slow and as if the words are taking some effort, “if we—if I—had more… equipment. Materials. If I had the ability to employ other methods.” 

Corvo rolls a shoulder. He can't shift his gaze from the windows. “You'll have whatever you need.” 

“Do you understand me?” Sokolov snaps his fingers under Corvo’s nose and Corvo looks sharply at him, irritated—more unsettled. Because yes, he thinks he might. “ _Other methods_. Uncomfortable ones. But.” He shrugs. His eyes are cold. “They were helpful before.”

He hadn't done those things, when Piero was working with him. He hadn't appeared to need them. But now. 

“Where's Piero?” 

“I don't know.” Sokolov’s tone is flat. “Serkonos, perhaps. He said something about a holiday.”

“Did you two fight?” 

“No.” Sokolov meets his gaze levelly, and with an expression completely unambiguous in its unspoken message. 

 _Leave it alone._  

Corvo studies him for a long, long moment. There's murder, and then there's this. There's the necessary killing of assassins, the execution of traitors, and then there's _this_. He's seen the ugliness of it first-hand. He's broken open the cages and let the _materials_ run free over the corpses of their guards. 

But he swore. He held her trembling little body in his arms and he swore to her, that she wouldn't have to do it all again. 

He's broken enough promises. 

“I said,” he says softly, “you’ll have whatever you need.” 

~ 

They don't send the Watch this time, to act as procurers. They don't send anyone. The servants were never allowed into Sokolov’s inner rooms as a matter of course, but now they're forbidden to set foot on the entire upper floor. No spying eyes means no wagging tongues. Everyone was already so beaten down and cowed by the time word of Sokolov’s _experiments_ began to spread that it wasn't one quarter the scandal it should have been, but times have changed since then. People aren't terrorized enough to let it go.

Bold measures in order to avoid bolder ones. 

Night. He slips into the city and toward the Old Port district with a shopping list of requirements in his head. To start with: adult but young, either male or female, in good health except for early stages of plague. One, and then, assuming it's necessary—and it almost certainly will be—another. 

And another. 

He passes by beggars huddled around a fire in a circle of rubble, a woman doubled over under a bridge and hacking blood into her cupped palm. A couple walking hand in hand, duet of drunken laughter. He finds what he's looking for when he Blinks onto a third-floor balcony: a pretty girl of no more than twenty-five curled up in bed, stirring and coughing lightly. He knows that cough. No one who lived through the plague could mistake it. 

Sleep dart in her neck. He wraps her in a sheet and slings her over his shoulder, carries her into the dark. 

~

He could leave. But he stays to watch. 

He hangs back, out of the harsh circle of light bathing the worktable. She's wearing only a rough shift, and when she begins to wake and struggles weakly against the leather straps, it rides up her thighs and he wrestles with the urge to tug it down and spare her modesty. 

Spare her something.

The gag between her jaws muffles her panicked cry when Sokolov leans over her with the syringe in his hand. No lies about how he's going to cure her. No reassurances about the great service she's performing for the cause of science. They're not going to obscure what they're doing. 

Damn it all to the Void, they'll be honest about this much. 

The needle sinks into her shoulder and she jerks, squeals, and as Sokolov withdraws her gaze flicks past him and focuses on—he tenses. He was hoping, he realizes, that she couldn't see him. 

Not that it'll matter. She’ll never be able to tell anyone. 

He waves a hand and time freezes, and in that frozen moment he turns and makes his way to the private lift. All the way down, listening to the faint song of the Void as it bleeds in through the cracks of what he's just done, he thinks of Emily’s stricken face. 

It's pointless to consider the question of bodycount when it comes to her. No number could ever be too high. 

Only much later, lying in bed and groping toward a few stolen hours of sleep, does it occur to him that he never once considered the Empire itself.

~ 

_Dreams are only dreams._

The words whispered into his ear, brush of cool lips. _If you like. If you'd prefer that to be so._ He arches against the body pressed against his back, all the terrible strength in that slight frame pinning him to nothing at all, and he shudders beneath those long fingers as they wander down the length of his bare torso. His lower belly quivers under the light scrape of nails. 

All around him, drifting shadows and broken stone. Before him, that table and the figure trapped inside its glow. Her shift is sliding up and up as she struggles, the graceful curve of her hips and the thatch of dark hair between her legs on full display. 

The Outsider’s fingers are working at his fly. He squeezes his eyes shut— _don’t, please don't_ —but he can see through his lids as if they aren't there at all.

 _You said you wanted honesty._ As if it's something he does all the time, the Outsider takes easy hold of his cock and draws it out, gives him one lazy stroke from root to head. He doesn't want to be hard. He is. _This is your honesty, Corvo. You don't get to look away from it._  

 _Do you even want to?_  

 _Look at her. Look at her face._  

Corvo moans helplessly and twists—he can't move his hands, his arms. He can only roll his hips into that firm, cruel, delightful grip, and gaze into the terrified eyes of Jessamine Kaldwin as he fucks the Outsider’s fist.

The light goes red and drips onto her, streaks her skin, pools beneath her. The gag is between his own jaws, and it muffles his shout as he comes. 

~

Not muffled enough.

“Corvo?”

Soft, small voice. He snaps upright, clutching at the sheets and staring wide-eyed into the dimness. He's stripped to the waist and in the fireplace across the room the fire has burned down to a low smolder, and the chill is more appropriate to the Month of Ice. Is the chill even real? She doesn't seem to be shivering. Standing by the half-open door, she looks like a pale little ghost in her pajamas and robe. 

_Who is she?_

He swallows. “What is it?”

“You yelled in your sleep, I thought…” She— _Emily, it's Emily for stars’ sake_ —shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “I thought you were having a bad dream, maybe I should wake you up. I'm sorry—I'm sorry, I'll go.”

“It's all right,” he murmurs. But she's gone, and the door shuts silently behind her. 

He sits, looking blankly at the place where she was. Finally he gets up and goes to the fire, stokes it back into a blaze, sits crosslegged in front of it and loses himself in the flames.

 _A day or two from now,_ the Heart whispers, clear as a nightmare bell from inside the chest, _he will burn her body. He will crush the bones that remain beneath his heel and dispose of the ashes in the river. And you, my love, will keep having your dreams, and they won't be contained._  

 _Do not dare to think this is the end._  

But it will end. When it does, they'll have a cure, and no bolder measures will be necessary.

Dreams are only dreams.

_Nothing is only anything._


	5. what a difference of the rushing out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In his quest to stop the plague, Corvo continues to collect material for Sokolov's experiments. But he's finding himself slipping in directions he doesn't expect - and doesn't hate the way he should.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, Outsider dialogue is fun to write. 
> 
> It's hitting me that in addition to this being a bit of a Dead Dove fic, I'm also exploring something I've been thinking about a lot when it comes to both games, which is how the kind of extreme canon-typical violence in the highest chaos runs might actually change this guy - because we have every reason to believe that he was never this violent before. I was playing The Brigmore Witches the other day and listening to some of the guards in Coldridge Prison talking about their impressions of Corvo and how he fought his way free, the way he seemed barely human, and especially how one of them believed losing Jessamine changed him. Obviously space is being left open there for interpretations of either high or low chaos, but that means it's easy to imagine that they're talking about a version of the story in which Corvo slaughters everyone in his way. Which makes me think about what all that time in prison did to his mind, what it prepared him to do, what parts of him may have died in there and what other parts might have been born. 
> 
> The game itself clearly revels in its own violence - the way especially gruesome kills happen in slow motion, the way the combat goes out of its way to make it satisfying (I played a series of high chaos runs during the Kavanaugh hearings and I swear it helped keep me sane). If you're already inclined to enjoy violent games, the design encourages and rewards viciously violent play. That's about the player, of course, but it has story and character implications too. 
> 
> I know I'm nowhere near the first person to take a deep dive into this, but it's something I'm very consciously doing - _just how far can this guy fall?_ How deep down this bloody rabbit hole can he go? What does it take to truly be too far gone, and what happens when the disease spills out and starts infecting your entire life? 
> 
> I'm sure it's not a surprise that that's a big part of what - I think at this point - I'm building toward in regard to pairing him eventually with Emily. 
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading. As always, I really appreciate knowing what you think. ❤️

The night of Emily’s fourteenth birthday, he ventures out again with Sokolov’s ugly shopping list smoldering in his coat pocket, and this time it goes badly.

He’s ready for a fight. He's been ready for a hundred fights, a thousand, the best the City Watch and the Overseers both have been able to throw at him. He's cut through a veritable army and left only corpses and the groans of those soon to join them in his wake. Like it was nothing. Like each shard of his own private war was nothing.

Which is probably the reason why it goes the way it does. And not merely because he could be looking for someone else to blame.

He's ready for a fight from the City Watch, from the Overseers, from gangs and thugs and smugglers, from assassins, from Daud, from even weepers in their last desperate mindless throes. He's not ready for a fight from a boy, and that might be why the boy manages to land a kick against his knee and knock him hard against the wall, splashing down the alley in the seconds between the blow and Corvo launching himself after. The boy is not very young, well past adolescence, but he's small, and although he's small his legs are long for his frame and surprisingly nimble. He dodges dumpsters and vaults over a stack of barrels, rounds a corner and sprints down another narrow street. He might yell, Corvo thinks with a jab of apprehension as he leaps ten feet from barrels to awning to catwalk and back down, yell and attract unwanted attention—although it's not as if he has much reason to care at this point—but the boy is silent.

He just runs.

It's not difficult to keep pace once he finds his stride. It would be an easy matter to bend time around his fingers, take him that way—sleep dart in the neck and off to Kaldwin’s Bridge. But he doesn't, and after a few moments on the rooftops and following onto a broader lane, past a cluster of surprised toughs looking up from where they're crouched around a tumbling set of dice, it occurs to him that he's playing. 

He's playing with this one—with this near _child_ , surely no older than sixteen. He's toying with him, because it's _fun_. The flick of his lens and briefly magnified sound: the hectic rush of breath and—he's almost certain he's not imagining it although his senses shouldn't be this keen—the trapped-bird flutter of a frightened heart.

Yet the boy is keeping his fear under control. Refusing to let it slow him, cause him to second-guess his movements as he darts through a broken barricade. It's admirable.

He does tangle time in his fingers then, tugs it to a halt and Blinks right into the boy’s path, casually lifts his sword and waits for the world to snap back into motion. The boy nearly collides with him, stumbles back, skids and takes off down another alley to the left. This part of the district appears to have been far less subject to their reconstruction efforts, and the boy scrambles over a cascade of rubble and onto the ruins of a second floor, levers himself over splintered beams to the third. Pauses to look back at the masked creature chasing him. 

His mistake. 

One must pay for those. 

Several things happen at once. The sharp crescent of the moon vanishes behind a cloud. A gust of wind tears through the ruins. Somewhere in the dark a hound lets out a mournful howl. The boy releases a harsh, terrified cry. Corvo slashes the boy’s throat open in a thick gush of red. 

And everything is still.

He shouldn't remove his mask. He knows this. He discovers that he has, and he's standing over the crumpled body with it in one hand and his sword in the other, blood slicking the hilt and the handle and down to his wrist. More blood pooling on the rotting boards, dripping onto the floor below. Trickling into the gutter. 

Head cocked like a crow, he stares in vague bemusement at what he's done, trying to process it. This is wrong. He wasn't supposed to kill anyone tonight. 

He was only supposed to deliver them to death. 

He drops to one knee, takes the boy’s jaw and turns his head more fully into what light there is. The boy’s skin is an unusually dark shade for someone Gristol-born. Perhaps he's not. Perhaps he has some other blood, on one side or the other or both. 

His dark eyes, too, so wide. The way he ran, the ease. Almost as if, at another time on another night, he might have run that way for the sheer joy of it. How he clearly knew the streets. His confidence as he moved through them. 

 _Familiar._  

All that, now ended forever. It's horrible, it's repellent, but he never realized before how _amazing_ it also is, that one man and one set of hands can end an entire world in a single stroke. 

He should feel appalled at himself. Horrified. Revolted.

He doesn't feel anything of the kind. 

~ 

It doesn't take much time to find someone else who fits Sokolov’s bill, and not much more time after that to make it back to Kaldwin’s Bridge. Sunrise is still a good way off. Sokolov is grimly appreciative. The work, he says, is going well. He believes he's on the verge of a breakthrough. One or two more subjects at most will likely be all he’ll require. 

Simple enough. It's strange, Corvo reflects as he melts into the shadows, that this work disturbed him so much only a few weeks before. Since then, every time it's been a little easier. But tonight is the first time it's been like _this_. 

Felt good. Like a hard fight used to feel. Except it's different now. 

He slips back into Dunwall Tower through an open window. He could tuck the mask into a fold of his coat and walk normally through the corridors, but instead he flits silently from chandelier to chandelier, listening to the nobles below as they make their tipsy way to the guest rooms set aside for them. Most of them will return to their estates, but certain others have been flattered with invitations to stay. The party is only just breaking up, though he saw Emily into bed before he left, despite her protests that she was old enough to stay up as long as she wanted. 

It would be the most natural thing in the world to fall on them and roll their heads across the floor. 

But that persistent itch inside him is no longer there. Rain has fallen on the parched desert and filled the cracks. Nothing is driving these fantasies but the fantasies themselves, and as fantasies go they're idle ones. 

He goes to his chambers. Bathes. Sleeps. He sleeps better than he has in a year. 

~

Sokolov needs three more, as it turns out. Two of them Corvo takes without incident. The initial third, a retired veteran of the Watch, is armed, and Corvo lets him get a single shot off before he spatters the man’s blood across his threadbare parlor rug. It might serve as justification.

 _Does he need that?_  

Sokolov’s new and improved elixir is released. The plague is contained. When the news is delivered, Emily hugs him as tight as she did when things were at their worst, and he holds her and the pleasure of having served her flows over him in a warm tide like Serkonan honey. 

The itch doesn't return. His sleep continues to be quiet. He doesn't go out again. For the time being, he leaves himself alone. 

~ 

His sleep is quiet, but when the Outsider appears, he's not certain he could properly call that _sleep_. Sleep is the doorway through which he steps into the Void, without a shrine as a portal. 

The doorway through which, sometimes, the Outsider comes to him. 

A week after he does what he does to the boy: a chilly, hollow wind whipping around his bed, from far below the shimmering song of a whale, and starless black eyes gazing down into his. 

Sitting upright, half tangled in the sheets, and then cool fingertips trailing down his bare arm. The Outsider smiles. 

So they walk. 

Up and down the silent corridors, they stroll like two friends taking a turn around the grounds. It's only when they pass a window and a shaft of moonlight and Corvo sees the motes stationary in the beam that he understands: they're passing through a single instant, the span of a split second open to them like an entire night.

He thinks of the woman leaping from the Tower in that frozen moment. The commitment to her own end that must have taken, being pushed to every possible edge and then over. 

It's almost like the old days, being with the Outsider this way. It was never _normal_ , being with him, but back then he kept his distance in every respect, appeared and spoke and observed, exuded little more than interest and cold, sardonic amusement, and as far as Corvo can recall never once touched him. Or not the way he does now. 

What happened to make him close that distance and step over an edge of his own? What happened to make him start _doing_ these things? 

 _I suppose you're waiting for me to mention it,_ the Outsider murmurs at last. _What you've been doing. What you did._  

“You were watching.” Not a question. 

 _Naturally. I'm always watching you, Corvo. You've taught me that it's very much worth my while._  

He grits his teeth. Yet he feels oddly calm. “Why? Why won't you leave me alone?” 

 _How many times do you need me to tell you? You're fascinating._ He stops and turns, arms crossed and head tilted slightly to one side. _I'd venture to say you're the most fascinating thing I've seen in a long time. Except perhaps for Daud, who was up to some_ extremely _intriguing business before you showed him how what he did to your Empress feels._ He pauses and flicks his tongue over very white teeth. _I suspect you and he might have had quite the conversation if you hadn't killed him. Not that I'm disappointed, of course._  

Sharp twinge. He thinks about that as little as possible. Not least because he's dogged by the sense that it was the end of something for him, the blocking of a particular passage that he'll never be able to force his way through. “Was I supposed to do anything else?” 

 _You weren't supposed to do one thing or the other. The choice was yours and you made it. Just like you're making these choices now. The thing you were waiting for me to mention_. Abruptly the Outsider turns away again and resumes his steady, leisurely pace. Without hesitation, although with a pang of resentment, Corvo follows. 

 _I started watching you because I knew you were at a point of divergence_. _The world was teetering on a brink, and you had the power to push it one way or the other. The most seemingly mundane action. A word to someone, a street taken in favor of another. Or something much bigger. The lives you snuffed out and the ones you allowed to continue_. His mouth quirks. _Not too many of the latter, as it turns out._  

“I made those choices. They're all dead. It's over.” 

 _Oh, it's not even close to over._ He stops again, catches Corvo’s arm. The hallway is full of shadows and whispers. All the hems are fraying. _I think your dead lover’s voice told you that much. I was watching you because I saw how you could change an empire with what I gave you, Corvo, and you did. Now I'm watching you because I want to know how_ you'll _change. And you're changing in some remarkable ways. Then again._ Hand once more on Corvo's arm, stroking fingers. He can't fight back his shiver. _Having seen what I've already seen, I'm not altogether surprised._  

“I'm—” He wants to look away. At those flitting shadows, at the frozen moonlight, at the dead eyes of a gazelle’s mounted head, at the muted glow of the chandeliers—at the door at the end of the hall which, with a ripple of dim horror, he realizes they’re approaching, and which he knew all along they would be headed toward. “It was necessary. I'm doing what I have to do.” 

For her.  

 _I’m talking about the boy,_ the Outsider says quietly. _And the old man. I'll grant that the others were necessary, yes. You might have relished them a bit much, but you can at least make the case. But those._ He braces his hands against Corvo’s chest and pushes up on his toes, and their lips nearly brush. He smells of Serkonan cloves and salty sea air and blood. _You did those because you_ liked _it. You did those because you wanted it so badly that you couldn't keep yourself from doing it._

Their lips do brush, then. It takes everything Corvo has to keep his moan locked behind his ribs.

 _Were you always like this? Did you always have these… appetites, hiding inside you? I honestly don't know. Maybe that's part of why I keep coming back to you. There are so few things I don't know. Mysteries are precious for something like me. Either way_. Barely a kiss. More like the fluttering of a moth’s wings. _The truth is that you_ _acquired a taste for death, after she died. The power of not only saving but taking a life. And I believe it's best for you when the choice to take it is fully yours._

He leans back and stares up. Corvo thinks he might fall into those eyes and never find his way out, and wonders if he should be afraid, and isn't. _Not even Daud ever took the satisfaction in it that you do. Murder is the addiction of warlords and tyrants. But it's also the addiction of street thugs and cutthroats and common criminals. You, I think, are none of those. I'm looking forward to seeing what you might turn out to be._

Smooth and graceful, moving as if gravity is something he merely deigns to be affected by, he steps away and takes Corvo’s hand. _Come, dear Lord Protector. Let’s look in on your new Empress._  

~ 

When she was still only a baby, he used to watch her sleep.

He couldn't help it. He was entranced by her, by her tiny perfection; it seemed beyond belief that something so delicate could be alive, and it seemed even more impossible that he could have had a role in _making_ something like her, that he could be a part of her. So time after time, long after Jessamine fell asleep with Emily dozing at her breast, he sat on the edge of the bed and watched them both with his breath a fist in his throat and his heart twisting behind his sternum, and he tried to make sense of the world as it had become. Who he was. Who he could be.

 _Father_. 

Even if he would never claim that title. Behind her bedroom door it was still his. 

He can't bear that now. It's torture. Standing here by her bed with this _monster_ beside him and watching her stir and mutter and turn over, and whether or not this is a dream if he could only summon the strength to spin on his heel and run— 

 _I'm a monster? Oh, that's funny. We’ll add comedian to your list of talents._ Before Corvo has the presence of mind to stop him, the Outsider steps forward and bends over her, reaching toward her face. _She really does look more like her mother every day, doesn't she? What do you think you'll do when she—_  

He does have the presence of mind to do this. It comes to him, the seething anger, slams into him and jolts him forward, gripping the Outsider’s arm hard enough to feel the bones grind— _so he does have bones_ —and practically hurling him away. Whirling on him with bared teeth.

“Don't you fucking _touch_ her.” 

The Outsider’s stance is solid, easy, as if he moved only because he wanted to, because he allowed himself to be moved. _What a wolfhound you are. All right. I don't have to touch her to keep an eye on her._

“Don't you fucking do that either.” But it's almost comical, how petulant he sounds, and how utterly pointless it is for him to say it. Directionless hatred chews at him. _Comedian_ indeed. 

 _What are you so worried about? Why, do you think I have_ designs _on her?_ A blur and the Outsider is pressing close to him again, those cool hands this time framing his face. _Anyway, I'd rather touch you._  

For a splinter of a moment, he fights the kiss as ferociously as he's ever fought anything—because _hands_ are one thing, even wicked hands that do the wicked things the Outsider suddenly seems to have a penchant for, but for some reason he can't untangle, a _mouth_ feels like something else entirely, yet another edge to tumble over, yet another Void to lose himself in. 

He can't. It's too much. 

Then something brittle in him snaps, and he lets go and sinks into it like he thought he might sink into those marvelously black eyes, finds a strong shoulder and a slim waist, and all the spirits help him, when the Outsider parts his lips with a seeking tongue and pushes into him, he pushes right back with a growl. 

~ 

And opens his eyes and blinks up at the dawn seeping in through the glass panes arching overhead, prickled with gooseflesh and painfully hard with nothing to take care of it except his own hand.

By _design_. 

His other hand burns and the burn flares when he touches himself, races through his blood and sears his nerves. It's not enough. It's not _enough_. 

_One way or another, Corvo, you'll always want more._


	6. the bolt busted loose from the lever

He doesn't forget the member of the Watch he saw at Sokolov’s house. He doesn't forget the hatred in her eyes, and how he considered the possibility that she might be a problem. 

She is.

It's by pure chance. A different choice, an accident of his fancy, and he might not have seen it coming—or he might have seen it coming but not the time and the method. But he still prowls the streets, slips into the bodies of crows and rats, and through open windows and ventilation shafts he listens to the people talk, and he makes sure to spread his territory around. He’s careful to leave no part of the city neglected. He attends to his Empress’s people.

The Spymaster will only be truly effective if there's nowhere he won't spy.

In the end he doesn't find them in the barracks, in the home of the officer who appears to be leading them, in any of the guardhouses in the streets, even in an alley or secluded courtyard. He finds her and he knows her, and on an evening choked by greasy rain he tracks her down a deserted lane, darting from shadow to shadow, now a rat and now a man, creeping across the ledges above her to a pub near the docks. He slips into another rat and follows her in through a high, broken window, through a shaft into—he's utterly unsurprised to discover—a back room.

Pubs and taverns and back rooms. Is there anywhere else conspiracies are hatched? Are there any other places where revolutionaries of all kinds make their plans? He almost wants to laugh.

He doesn't. He breaks loose of the flesh and the fur, Blinks before he has a chance to become fully visible, situates himself on top of the broad hanging lamp and listens.

Seven of them. Packed around a small table, all hunched over glasses of beer. Not all of them are wearing the uniform of the Watch, but he recognizes them all: There's her, of course, but he's seen the tall, red-headed officer hired to work a ball in the Estate District, the younger girl and the two young men all training in a barracks yard, and the two older men remaining…

He couldn't forget them. He couldn't ever.

One of them dislocated his arm in Coldridge Prison. The other was among those watching and laughing and cheering his pain.

Somehow he missed them when he killed his way out, and later he missed them again when he swept out the traitors and the obviously untrustworthy.

Well. Now and then we get opportunities to correct past mistakes. One should never let them pass by.

“—already know that we could get at least ten more on our side,” the officer is saying, his voice low and earnest. “Senior, too, even to me. Haven't actually brought them in yet, I want to be sure we can trust them, but if I have a little more time—”

“And how exactly are you going to be sure?” The woman he followed sits back and crosses her arms. “We make a single mistake and it's our heads. I'm sure I don't have to tell you, but—”

“But here you go anyway,” one of the Coldridge guards growls. “You think we’re not all piercingly fuckin’ aware of what we’re up against? We’re dancin’ on the razor’s very edge. We’ll be glad of it if beheadin’ is the worst we get.”

The girl looks around, thick brows drawn together. “Maybe it wouldn't be that bad. The young Empress is a kind soul, or so they say, maybe she'd be inclined to be—”

“Merciful?” The officer releases a harsh laugh and takes a deep swig of his beer. “You haven’t seen her up close. I'm telling you, she's got a look about her. It's hard to put into words, but the things she’s seen, what she's been through… She ain't no girl. Not anymore.”

“Ain’t even her,” the other Coldridge guard says quietly. “She's not the one. She’ll sign off on whatever _he_ does. And I've seen him. I've seen how he does. I was there when he broke out of prison. It's not just that he works bloody.” He pauses, rubbing the gray stubble along his jaw. “It's that he _likes_ it.”

Corvo’s eyes slide closed. In his hands, his sword is a pleasant, grounding weight. His blood whispers through his ears.

_Did you always have these appetites, hiding inside you?_

The officer waves a hand. “Whatever. Let it go. What we need to concern ourselves with is what we do next. Building numbers is important for what comes after, but the thing itself… Small and nimble will be the best way.” He plucks a cigar from an ashtray at his elbow and puffs moodily. “The more of us there are when all’s done, or the more we’re sure are sympathetic, the easier it'll be to put down any opposition. Make the people see we’re in the right, mind. But the fewer of us when we do it, the less likely it is someone’ll blab.”

“And you're sure about keeping her alive,” the woman murmurs. “The Empress.”

The officer looks at her for a long moment, the cigar dropping flakes of ash into the tray. “I said she ain't no girl. But she's young. Dunwall doesn't love her, not by a long shot, but they don't hate her. They don't fear her, either. It's the power _behind_ her. That butcher standing beside the throne. What he did to get there. _That's_ who they hate, who they fear. That's who we need to deal with. You kill Emily Kaldwin, you watch everyone else turn on us, and who'll we put up in her stead, anyhow?” He barks a laugh. “Not a single one of those prigs in Parliament’s got any claim, blood or otherwise. No. She has to stay.”

There's another silence, and it settles around the table like the smoke drifting from between the officer’s lips. Corvo opens his eyes but keeps them slitted and admits the world in glowing blurs, mere impressions—half shifted into the place where the walls melt away and only the radiance of living bodies remains, their fiery cones of vision, the echoes of their footsteps like ripples across the surface of a pond. Their heartbeats, all racing. Even the officer’s, pounding against his ribs, between his smoky lungs.

The Heart’s sigh, even so far, locked in her coffin across the city, in the sky. She's miles away from him but somehow he's never heard her with such brutal clarity.

_They're right about you. What the people hate. What they fear. What they know. They look at you, and they know._

_It shines black in your eyes, plain for them to see._

At last the first Coldridge guard leans forward, his fingers steepled and his voice a grim rasp. “I know I said we all get what we're up against. But you need to understand what you're proposin’. The full of it. I've been with you since the beginning, you know that—me and Bennie here. Stars know how many people would call this high treason, but you know that we’re loyal to the Empire and always have been. We get what needs doing and we won't deny it, no matter how hard it comes, and we don't shy away from gettin’ our hands bloody. But what you’re sayin’. Takin’ him down. We told you, we saw how he is. We were there that day.” He glances at his companion, eyes hooded and dark. “You're sayin’ we kill a man. I'm tellin’ you that he's not a man. He's somethin’ else.”

The girl draws a breath. “They say he's a witch. That he consorts with the Outsider. Does foul rituals in the Tower’s cellars.” She peers at the guards. “You believe it?”

“I dunno what I believe. I know what I've seen. Back in the prison, he didn't have no witchcraft in him then, not that I could make out. But as to what I could make out?” The guard bares teeth yellow with nicotine. “He's a killer. To the absolute fuckin’ marrow of his evil bones, he's a cold-blooded killer. He does it like he was born to it, like it's all he wants to do. Then he cut down how many worthy folk to get to the Regent and his men? He went up against an army and slaughtered them like a bunch of blood ox calves.

“And you.” He levels a finger at the officer. “You're sayin’ we’ll go in, no more than ten of us and maybe less, and we’ll take him down in one night, in minutes, and we won't fail. It's madness.” He huffs a harsh laugh. “It’s suicide.”

The officer regards him coolly. “I didn't say we’d all make it out alive.”

“Right now I'd lay down every coin in my pouch that none of us will.”

One of the young men clears his throat, and his tone is placid. Almost placating. “But you're still here.”

“Said I knew what had to be done, didn't I?” The guard shrugs, throws up his hands. “I can't bear it no more. I'd rather go out with my sword and my gun in my hands than watch that monster poison this city another day.”

“If you do,” the officer says, “I'll raise a statue to you in the Tower courtyard. To any of us who fall. But you'll have to bear it twelve more days. Just be ready when you get the assignment.” Another swallow of beer, and he sets the glass down on the table with a dull, decisive sound. “I'll arrange it all. The rest of you, be there and be ready.”

Corvo could stay longer. He could hear more. But he doesn't need to; it's easy to fill in the blanks for himself. Assignments. Guard rotations. Moving the right pieces into the right places on the board, and he already knows the time.

The corner of his mouth twitches as he eases himself back into a rat and scurries away, becomes the twitch of whiskers. It's so simple. Crude. Embarrassingly so. Precisely the kind of thing he virtually _exists_ to root out, and this isn't the first plot of its type he's cut off before it could begin in earnest.

This one doesn't trouble him—although the implications are in truth somewhat troubling, and suggest to him that further action will be necessary even after this part is over. Ten others, at least. Ten others, their loyalties unreliable at best, and so far he's missed them. What purges he completed weren't so complete after all. How many more are there? How deep does the rot go?

 _It's all rotten,_ moans the Heart. _Down to the deepest of those roots you've tried to tear out. Didn't you hear them? They hate you. They fear you. All of them. If you don't turn aside from this road you’re on, the entire city will spit your name like a curse._

So they hate him. He's long past the point of giving a damn about that. As far as fearing him goes…

Maybe they just don't fear him _enough_.

~

 _You do realize something else,_ the Outsider says mildly.

They're walking side by side along a narrow stone bridge that assembles itself a few feet ahead of them, fragment after fragment composing itself with the sound of slate shavings cascading through parted fingers. Far below them, a school of whales drifts through the brilliant darkness, their tentacles dancing like kelp buoyed by the waves. The chorus of their voices is like a wind carding through Corvo’s hair.

Every time he comes here, now, it's a little easier. It feels a little more _right._

“What's that?” His voice is once again sharp and immediate in his own ears like it never used to be. He likes it.

 _You could have killed them all right there. It would have taken you seconds and you would have saved yourself a world of trouble. And it would have been safer, for her. But you let them all leave that room alive, and in five days they'll come for you._ The Outsider shoots him a look, all that familiar sardonic amusement. _You know why. Surely you don't need me to tell you._

He doesn't. He leans his head back and watches tiny rocky worlds spin overhead. The Mark burns gently, as if he's put his hand just a little too close to an open fire. “I want them to.”

 _You want to let them think they've almost made it. You want to let them get close enough to see the hope flare in their eyes, and watch it fizzle into terror before you snuff it out forever._ Cool fingers brushing his. A delightful shiver trickles down his spine. _Will you enjoy that as much as the blood, I wonder? Will you love it the way you love the screams? Or is it the entire thing? Like dish at a feast, with every herb and spice perfectly mixed and every garnish in its place. Separate from each other, they're just things in jars and bowls. All together…_

The Outside flickers ahead and around to face him, stops with a hand against his chest. _I'll be watching you, Corvo. As usual, I’ll be watching you very closely._

He closes his own hand around the Outsider’s slender wrist, tightens his grip—the Outsider doesn't try to pull away, and Corvo feels something flitting around the edges of everything like a silent black moth. Something he might reach for and, if he's quick enough, catch.

“Am I your only entertainment these days?”

 _You're by far the most fulfilling._ Suddenly the Outsider snaps his hand free and reverses the grip, holding Corvo firmly enough to make him gasp and curling his other hand around the back of Corvo’s neck, pulling them flush. Rolling his hips and making the erection straining at Corvo’s fly throb even harder.

Cold, slick lips and sharp teeth colliding with his. A bite more than a kiss. Corvo gropes clumsily at the Outsider’s shoulders, and the rocks are disintegrating all around them, leaving them spinning through nothingness. Once he would have been afraid of this, but now he knows how he can fall and fall and never hit the ground.

When you fall long enough, how much difference is there between that and flying?

 _I love watching you work,_ the Outsider murmurs against his mouth. _Oh, dear Corvo. I know you won't let me down._

The whales’ song rises to a bellow, and then to a scream.


	7. I want to see you happy, I want to see you shine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fandom being what it is, I really do have to emphasize once more at this juncture: DEAD. DOVE. 
> 
> I do not actually think _any_ of what's happening is good or okay irl. Corvo Attano is a horrible person and should go to prison forever. But being that this isn't irl, I'm gonna roll in the depravity. 
> 
> ❤️

It's pure perversity that makes him do it.

Can't be anything else. No other motivation could drive him, the morning before they're due to come, to unlock the trunk and take the Heart in his hand and tuck it into a fold of his coat. It— _she,_ he can't stop thinking of it as _she_ —seems to exhale at his touch, and pressed against the fine silk of his shirt, it clicks and grinds and throbs.

Before, he would have carried her openly and trusted her to remain unseen and unheard by the rest of the world. He has no reason to assume that it wouldn't work that way now, but for reasons he doesn't entirely understand, he keeps her concealed as he makes his way through halls and down staircases toward the throne room.

He also doesn't have to squeeze her. He doesn't have to touch her any more than he already is. His sheer will appears to be enough.

It's yet another feast day. No particular occasion of the calendar; it's merely one of those events an empress is expected to hold periodically, give the nobles a chance to meet and greet and gladhand, simper and preen at each other. Emily hates them, has since she was small enough to know what they were, but while in those earlier, simpler days her hatred sprang from her desire to be in the courtyard with him, pretending to be soldiers or assassins or pirates, now he senses that its source is rather deeper.

Rather more adult.

She's already on the throne when he enters the room, her scarlet waistcoat and breeches pressed, shoes gleaming, her ruff immaculate and her dark hair pulled back in a spiraling knot, and she's actually managing to hide most of her surly resentment at the situation as a whole, which impresses him. But the subtlety of her expression, her hair, her bearing and the way she sits—it strikes him in the chest and stops him dead, half concealed by a pillar and the shadow it throws, watching her as she leans her chin on her hand and surveys the assembled Court. They shimmer and glow in the light of the chandeliers, brilliant and golden and outshining the thin sunlight that beams in through the high windows.

They're all here to be seen and they're in the season’s finest—which of course they'll discard as soon as the season turns. More than one of them, he's gleaned, are here to be noticed by _him;_ one of the two remaining ladies Boyle—he can never keep track of which one, which he'd guess is by design—has recently been looking him over in a way he doesn't much like when he has the misfortune to be in the same room with her. Whatever romantic entanglements he had in the past appear to have been relegated to the past, and he's heard the gossip and speculation about whether he might take a lover—or, by the stars above,a _wife_ —and if so who it might be, or alternately whether he'll remain celibate out of a discipline borne of grief.

 _If only they knew, dear Corvo. If only they knew who you've been_ consorting _with._

 _Especially the High Overseer. Oh, what his face would do._

But regardless of who or what he's meant to see, he can't stop looking at Emily, because it's like looking at a ghost.

Which it always has, to some degree. But never like this.

She's barely fifteen now. But almost all of the last of her childishness has fled her and she looks like she could be seventeen, eighteen, even a year more than that. The baby fat just about completely gone from her body, leaving behind lean, elegant muscle. Her cheeks and cheekbones, the height of her brow. Her jawline. Her long-fingered hands. It's not as if he didn't see her only last night. She hasn't aged in a few hours. Only it seems that she has, whether it's the arrangement of her hair or the way she sits on the throne or something else entirely.

Jessamine retained her girlishness at fifteen. It took him the better part of another three years to truly begin to see her differently. It's that version of Jessamine she most resembles now, the one on the cusp of assuming the throne and all the heaviness of its authority, lovely and grave and prone to moods. She had no illusions about what was waiting for her, a doom as much as a destiny.

Emily used to harbor delightful illusions. That's over. They lie in heaps of rubble in the flooded ruins of her childhood.

 _Oh, sweetheart. It hurts to see you this way_.

Is that his own internal voice? Or is it another’s? He's not certain, but as he steps forward and into her field of vision and bows, as she gives him a cursory regal nod and a wave of her hand, he feels a soft pulse against his side, a flutter against his ribs.

A sigh against his ear.

 _She despises every one of them. It gets worse with each passing day._

_In her idle moments, now and then, she fantasizes about having a few of them executed. She does not suspect that her thoughts run alongside yours. She would not be disturbed if she knew_.

 _There is a darkness in her. It grows like a cancer._

As he always does, he takes his place at her side, his hands folded behind his back as he surveys the room more directly. Something moving inside his skull, the tumbler in a lock turning, and Dark Vision sweeps over him and the world melts into that warm orange-gold, the hall a mass of shimmering bodies and the cones of fire blazing from their eyes. As always, he sees right through them.

This is not so much a practical move as it is a pleasurable one.

He sees through them because they are so utterly inconsequential. They're beneath her. Barely worthy of her consideration. Yet they have the audacity to step forward to offer their greetings and be formally received by her, and as he returns his gaze to its normal mode he doesn't miss the way her mouth twists with distaste.

Likely too subtle for any but the most observant to notice. But he knows her so very well.

Another pulse. The image of a woman stirring and heaving onto her side in a restless dream, a dream she's been imprisoned by for years. _They don't like her. Not a single one of them. They look only for an advantage over her. They are resentful when they encounter you there, standing like a spiked siege wall between her and them. They dislike you far more._

 _You already know this. You have always known._

The procession continues. His eyes narrow. Rats creep along the wainscoting at the edges of the room. Someone has put on an audiograph; the music is warbling unnaturally and slightly off-key.

The whispers from the Heart are now nearly constant.

 _This one keeps an orphan boy chained up in his cellar. He will do unspeakable things to him when he returns home._

_This one emerged from the plague with a small fortune added to the one he already had. He hired bandits to pry gold teeth and rings from the corpses of the victims. Not all of them were completely dead_.

_One night when she was young this one drugged two of her friends and watched as four of her servants used them for hours. She chose the biggest from among her staff—huge, cruel men. It remains the greatest pleasure she has ever experienced._

_This one drinks and beats his horses. They are purebred, and priceless. Someday he will lock them in the stable and set it on fire. He will laugh as they scream_.

 _This one lost her brother a year ago. She loved him and misses him terribly. She didn't want to have him killed, but he was going to tell their father what she had been doing to him since they were children. She would have lost her inheritance_.

 _This one murders abandoned infants with her bare hands in the darkness of a new moon and paints herself with their blood according to the song of the runes she's collected. She lusts for the Outsider’s attention. He laughs at her. Ask him about it, the next time he visits you._

Once it would have been nearly unbearable to hear these things. Now he listens with all the cool detachment of a lizard, and he marks each one.

At some point he turns his gaze back to Emily—looking at her, albeit strange, is infinitely more pleasant than staring at those simpering faces. The Heart stirs again.

 _She is imagining that you are slaughtering them like oxen. She is imagining the stones soaked in their blood. She knows you could do it. She believes it would be easy for you. She believes that if she asked you to do it, later, in secret, you would not hesitate._

_She does not know it herself, not yet. But part of her senses what you are_.

He doesn't bother to suppress his smile.

~

Once the reception is over, the feast itself begins. They will, of course, both have to attend.

The two of them are the last to leave the throne room; the guests have all filed into the banquet hall. It's some distance away, but their chatter and laughter is audible, echoing through the corridors accompanied by that same tuneless music.

He steps in front of the throne and offers her his hand with a different smile that's equal parts sympathy and apology. He wears that smile too often these days and he's beginning to loathe it.

“At least there's cake?”

She releases a dramatic sigh and takes his hand, rising. One thing that hasn't changed from those days before: she adores cake of all kinds. Years ago she vowed more than once that when she was Empress she would have cake every _every_ day, as much as she wanted, and while she hasn't followed through on that particular commitment, she has employed an additional pastry chef entirely to produce them on demand. Usually they can go a little way toward placating her bad moods.

Now, however, the way she's looking at him doesn't leave him brimming with confidence that it'll work this time.

In fairness, this night is different. Even if she doesn't yet know how or why.

It's not completely accurate that they're the last ones left in the throne room. Flanking the door, two of the Tower Guard. New, they are, freshly rotated in for the occasion. Several of them have been. He gave the roster a cursory glance when it was handed to him and signed off on it almost immediately. It wasn't as though he needed to see the names. It wasn't as though they would tell him anything he didn't already know.

He ignores the two of them as he passes with Emily on his arm. He imagines their heads on pikes mounted on the Tower’s battlements, the crows pecking at their eyes.

Halfway down the corridor, he stops her, takes her gently by the shoulder and holds her in place as he moves in behind her. They're standing before a large mirror framed in polished silver, and in it she meets his eyes with an arched brow and a quizzical look.

“Catch came undone,” he says, hands at the nape of her neck as if to adjust the ruff. “Hold still.” Then, leaning like he would be if he simply needed to better see what he was doing, he whispers, “Don’t sleep in your bed tonight.”

She stiffens. Her reflected eyes widen. He continues fiddling with the back of her collar as if he said nothing at all, even as he continues speaking rapidly.

“Take one of your bolsters and cover it with the sheets like it's you. Sleep in the safe room. Don't come out until I come to get you, not for anything.”

“Corvo,” she breathes. “What's happening?”

This isn't the ideal place to have a conversation. Really, he should pull her into one of the lounges or smoking rooms nearby. But another two of them—the ones from Coldridge—are at the far end of the corridor by the entrance to the banquet hall, and while he isn't looking at them, he knows they're watching.

Everything must appear perfectly normal. Everything must appear what it can never possibly be.

The truth is that since he set foot on a weathered Dunwall pier, he was learning the fine art of deception. He needed no Outsider to teach him that trade, and he's always been the keenest of students.

“There's a plot. They'll try to move tonight. Don't worry, I have it in hand. You just do as I tell you.”

A flash of something mutinous in her eyes, and for a tense second he thinks she might be about to argue with him. Then she nods minutely, once, and steps away from him, smoothing her ruff and waistcoat. “Thank you, Corvo. That looks much better.”

Clever girl. Clever, and prudent, and although she must—and now does—reclaim his arm with her small, perfect hand and resume their stroll down the corridor and they can't speak any more about this until it's all over, he wants very much to praise her. He suspects he doesn't do that enough. It should concern him more often, that she understand the full intensity of the pride he takes in her. In the meantime he’ll do what he can for her in every other respect.

He’s already discovered how terribly far he’ll go.

But by the time they reach the door to the banquet hall, she's moving like a condemned man to the executioner’s block, feet dragging and head down, none of the imperious and appropriately imperial attitude she's supposed to maintain. Through the artfully latticed glass of the door spin and seethe a mass of bodies, silk and velvet and brocade, cosmetics applied to men’s and women’s faces like sugar icing on a tart—cheeks red as if from a slap, the raw crimson slashes of their mouths, their tongues flapping with a sound like shrill birds. They turn and turn under the crystal and the mirrored lenses. He can hear the din of the music droning and squeaking beneath their voices. He can practically smell the stinking melange of their perfume.

By the Void, he’d swear he didn't use to hate them all this way.

 _You didn't hate anyone, Corvo. Not really. You were learning the art of deception even your happiest days, but true hatred is something you were taught relatively late in life._

_And my, how quickly you've taken to it._

The Coldridge guards are very close now—he and Emily are practically standing between them—but he doesn't care. He doesn't give the smallest fraction of a shit. Let them glimpse whatever truths they will; he doesn't need to worry about maintaining appearances when it comes to two men who won't live to see another sunrise. Especially not when everyone already knows this particular truth.

He stops her once more and turns her to face him, lifts his hands and frames her cheeks. They're not genuinely pale—none of her is, she was born with something in between her mother’s creamy skin and the darker Serkonen tone of her father, and wasn't that never going to be anything but a tell—but they're surprisingly cool, and he feels his own warmth in his thumbs as he strokes them across her cheekbones.

She gazes up at him with her large, deep eyes. Jessamine’s eyes, and all at once his stomach seems to detach itself from the rest of him and sink into the floor, down to the cellar to be eaten by his own rats.

The Heart is motionless and silent.

He leans in and presses his lips to her brow, and she exhales and both loosens and straightens. As a child she wanted and gave hugs with wild abandon. Since those days abruptly ended, the expressions of physical affection between them have been minimal. He doesn't know when he last kissed her. He doesn't know why that thought should extinguish the warmth in him and bloom frost through his veins.

“You can make it through this,” he murmurs against her forehead. Pulls back and slides a loose strand of hair behind her ear. He smiles at her, and it’s not like it was before; it doesn't feel like putting on a mask. Rather the opposite. “It's just a stupid party. You've been to hundreds.”

“And I'll have to throw hundreds more.” She sighs again and nods, curls her fingers around his wrists, squeezes as he lowers them. “I know, Corvo. I'll be fine.”

He nods. But before he pushes the door open and ushers her genteelly through, he leans back in, hand on her upper arm and his mouth just brushing the shell of her ear, and he doesn't want to examine too closely the way he enjoys it when her breath catches and a minute shiver runs through her.

What he has to say is for her alone. And he's certain she’ll take its full meaning, because she knows him. She knows him better than any living human. Where someone else would hear more sympathy and a touch of pettiness, she’ll hear steel and blood and the distant echoes of screams.

 _Don't_. The Heart remains inert, and in that essential stillness its voice is like the wail of a shipwrecked ghost across a vast gray sea. _Don't, don't. Oh, don't._

“I know you hate them,” he whispers, and smiles again. This smile is very different from the others he's given her. He's confident that she can feel it, even if she doesn't see.

“I hate them too.”


	8. I feel you, your rising sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy this just keeps getting worse and worse doesn't it
> 
> I mentioned when I updated my Corvo the Black fic the other day how much of a trip it is to be writing this degree of darkfic when [the other main corvosider thing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651547/chapters/44231866) I'm in the process of posting is so sweet and wholesome and - hopefully in the upcoming chapters - even funny. Like, it's _weird._
> 
> What's also a trip is how I keep seeing parallels between this fic and said Corvo the Black thing, almost as if these are two thematically similar tales mirroring each other. That or I'm not especially imaginative. Either way, it's cool. 
> 
> Lemme know what you think. Enjoy, if one can be said to enjoy this kind of perversity. I promise I won't tell if you do. ❤️

He wasn't expecting it to be difficult. But he also wasn't expecting it to be so wonderfully easy.

There are, as it turns out, a number of ways in which things proceed that he didn't expect.

He recalls his massacres. They come to him borne on heady waves like the memory of the stink of blood; the natural philosophers claim that one can't recall through smell the way one summons up memories of images and sounds, but he knows from very personal experience that they're wrong. He recalls that smell now, as he picks them off one by one. They weren't ready to move against him, not just yet. But when the leaders of this motley crew of assassins—the officer and the woman he saw at Sokolov’s house and followed to their conspiracy—sense what's happening, they'll try to accelerate the plan out of sheer desperation and the instinctive knowledge that they no longer have much to lose.

They’ll sense it. He’ll make sure of that.

The girl is on patrol in the corridor, heading toward his chambers; she's first, and he Blinks from atop a chandelier and skewers her throat with the point of his sword, watches as she crumples to the carpet choking on her own blood, pale red bubbles gathering around her mouth like foam. He picks her up and heads downstairs, and from above in the servant’a quarters he drops the girl’s body at the feet of the two young men. He gives them time—gives himself time, to drink in the astonishment on their faces and the terror that sweeps in after it—before he falls on them, grasps more of that time and slows it so he can take care of them at his leisure. Do it with even more precision than usual. Gut wounds, which will be lethal but won't be quick. Another thing he takes care to execute correctly.

By the moment at which time resumes its normal pace—or when he exits his own frozen bubble and rejoins its regular flow—and they stagger back clutching their bellies and emitting grating moans, he still hasn't left them. His fist snaps around the younger one’s neck and he digs in his nails, drags him close.

He didn't notice before, how pretty the boy is. How fine his features, how clear his eyes. He never bought into all that bullshit about bloodlines, though he kept his mouth shut when Pendleton and Wallace spouted it at him, but he's sure they would say this one has a strain of nobility in him.

He isn't wearing his mask this time. He wants them to see him, and see it when he smiles. “Scream,” he whispers, and hurls the boy away and sends him sprawling onto the floor, into the pool of blood gathering beneath his fallen companion.

Whether it's reflexive obedience or a frantic, stupid hope that if he obeys this monster he might still be allowed to live, he does. He screams at the top of his lungs.

Corvo cuts off the scream along with his head.

~

He knows they've heard it when he returns upstairs. He hears the muffled drum of their feet against the carpet and it seems to match the steady hammering of his heart. As has become one of his customary modes, he flits from chandelier to chandelier and watches them run. The two Coldridge guards consulting hurriedly with the officer and the woman in a room opposite Emily’s chambers; he sends his perception out to them and eavesdrops.

“—have to do it now,” the officer is saying. “He's in his room, he has to be—I saw him go in and I never saw him leave.”

One of the Coldridge guards barks a gruff laugh, shakes his grizzled head. “I toldja. He ain't human. Got more in common with a demon than a man. You honestly think he couldn't get outta there without you noticing? He slipped outta prison like it was nothin’. When he wasn't spillin’ blood, that is.” He looks around, as if he expects to see Corvo advancing on them. “We’re all dead. We were the second we started this foolishness.”

The officer sucks air in through his teeth. “Then why did you, Bill? Why did you bother?”

“‘cause,” the guard says. He sounds very calm. “I couldn't stand by while somethin’ like him did what he's doin’. Even if it meant death, I couldn't. Won't go to my grave that way.”

“Then we’ll go to it fighting.” The officer whirls and the woman follows him without a word. The guards exchange unreadable looks and follow as well.

They have a key to his room. He allowed them to get it, with just enough difficulty that they would believe they did it themselves. He remains at his perch, and only once they've gotten the door open and burst into the room with swords and pistols drawn does he go to them.

He recalls his massacres. He recalls how they began like the turning of a tide and they advanced that way, buoying him up into themselves rather than requiring any particular effort from him. At their foundations they were easy. They concealed a rhythm for him to find; they were like a dance. Fighting has always felt like dancing to him, and keeping with the Serkonan stereotype, he dances extremely well. He suspects that talent is one of the first things that made Jessamine look at him in that new way, speculatively hungry, like the newborn licking flames of a bonfire. Don't we desire before we love? Don't we want before we embrace? He had no illusions. He knew what he might have been to her, had he not become so much more. He knew what people like him often become, the places that tend to be made for them, even if they carry a title as a cover. He might have been her concubine instead of her lover. He might have been her stud, and merely serviced her. Even if she fucked him, she was under no obligation to love him.

That she did love him broke something inside him in the sweetest possible way, and he has never recovered from that wound. It hurts him now more than it ever has. It hurts him as he recalls his massacres, and he holds that pain close like he once held her, and he luxuriates in the memories of the shadows of bodies falling into the night, in the soft wet thud of corpses under his boots, the metallic tang of fresh blood on his tongue and the sharp, thin smell of it in his nose, in the symphonies of shouts and cries of anger and panic and agony. He would play music for her in the evenings, as she sat before the fire and drank her whiskey and smoked her cigars. After her murder he learned new songs and his blade and his magic sang the slaughter. The Heart nestled against his chest and he knew part of her heard, and he shouldn't have taken pleasure in the cruelty of that but now he will admit to himself that he did.

When did this happen to him? When was the instant of his corruption? He intuits that it wasn't a single moment at all, unless it was a moment of conception. It took time to take root and to grow. Now it's a riot of crimson blooms, a hideous garden, and he recalls his massacres as he slashes the woman’s throat open and she bathes the officer in a hot jet of arterial blood, as he turns to the first Coldridge guard and cuts off one hand and then the other and then spears his heart and collapses him in a bloody heap like one of Emily’s old dolls thrown against the wall in a fit of childish rage.

The second guard doesn't appear remotely surprised. He lowers his sword, his pistol, and stands erect.

“C’mon, then. Get on with it.”

“Your courage is worthless,” Corvo says conversationally, as if they're discussing the fluctuating price of whale oil. “No one will remember you.” A grin slides across his face. It feels like the glide of smooth, cold fingertips. “You have a daughter. She has a son. They'll both rot in Coldridge.”

The abject horror that breaks open in the man’s eyes as he dies is sublime.

_And then there was one._

He turns on the officer. The man stands with his sword and pistol held loosely in his hands, trembling as his entire body trembles, and when Corvo takes a step forward he drops them, stumbles backward. It's almost disappointing, the lack of defiance. But so many men fold like a bad Nancy player when you slam them up against a wall. Perhaps it's nothing more or less than he should have expected.

Corvo swings his sword through the air. The casual quality of the movement is not an affectation. Although it's not moving fast enough, it seems to whistle. “You said there were more.”

“I.” The man gulps, glances wildly around as if he believes there might even now be some avenue of escape left open to him. Which Corvo can actually respect. It's not pathetic. It’s a state he knows well. It's certainly better than standing and waiting for death like waiting to be served a drink in a pub. “I don't know what you mean. It was just us. It was only ever us.” Then there is defiance, only a flicker of it but unmistakable. “And you got them. You murdering bastard, haven't you had enough blood? Aren't you satisfied?”

“No,” Corvo answers simply. _You'll always want more._ “You know of others. _At least ten more on our side,_ you said.” Dawning, terrified realization; at the sight of it his lips curve the smallest bit. “Yes, I was there that night. I heard it all.”

The officer doesn't speak at all for a moment or two. Corvo shifts his sword idly in his hand. He can be patient. He's cultivated patience.

But when the man breaks the silence, a shard of the Coldridge guard’s calm has worked its way into his tone. “You'll kill me either way.”

“Probably. But it can be better for you. Or it can be much, much worse.”

The officer coughs a sour laugh. “Of course you wouldn't just be a killer. Is that why you haven't hired another interrogator? You do it all yourself?”

Corvo shrugs. “Haven't really had anyone to interrogate. Not until now. Not formally, anyway.”

He recalled his massacres. Now a quieter memory comes to him, easing into the light: Setting the rats on Sokolov in the cage. Watching him leap and squeal. Enjoying it more than he thought he might. Sitting alone in his room in the attic of the Hound Pits, staring at the gore crusted along the outlines of his fingernails and wondering if there was something truly wrong with him. If he was sick somehow. Whether that was a new development, or he had always been that way and merely never knew.

“I’ll tell you nothing.”

“Is that so.” Not a question. A slight wave of his hand and rats boil up out of the floor.

He didn't have much control over them in the beginning. Not even at the end of that first bloody purge. But in the last couple of years he's found that he can direct them with more and more accuracy, with flexes of his will alone. It's as if he thinks and they obey. He sends them now, with particular instructions: _The legs. The feet and halfway up the legs, no more than that for the present_.

There are many of them. Twenty at least—a frankly unusual amount, as if someone has sent him a few extra. Even half that many can strip a body to the skeleton in a matter of minutes if they're left to do so. In seconds the man’s boots are shredded, and he totters and falls to the floor, kicking and letting out strained, high-pitched yelps as they chew away the skin and muscle from his shins and calves. They flay him and then butcher him, and neither is done neatly, but it’s so fast that there isn't much blood.

The man sags backward. He's cowering weakly against the bookshelf, regarding the gruesome destruction of his lower legs with a mixture of anguish and numb disbelief. Perhaps he’s in such shock that he doesn't even feel significant pain. At least not yet.

The rats back off. They circle like redsharks, blood beaded on their whiskers like tiny rubies. Corvo lowers himself smoothly into a crouch and rests his arms on his knees, still gripping his sword although he no longer anticipates using it. “Names.”

The officer groans thickly. Tosses his head like a man in the throes of plague fever. “Fuck you. I won't.”

“They _will_ eat you alive.”

The officer doesn't answer.

The rats take the rest of his legs.

Before they're done he slumps, the ragged shrieks dying in his chest, and Corvo realizes with a touch of annoyance that he's lost consciousness. A few firm slaps across the face seem to bring him at least partially back, but his eyes are bleary and unfocused when Corvo grips him by hair gone lank with sweat and jerks his head up, studying him.

“I don't have to do this all in one night, you know. I can stretch it out for days.”

The man tries to spit at him. Saliva dribbles from between his lips and drips in a long translucent strand onto his chest. Corvo rolls his eyes.

The officer’s hands are slimy reddish bone strung with wet garlands of shredded flesh, most of his forearms too, when he finally gives Corvo the names. Corvo listens attentively and repeats each one in silence, feeling the curves and angles of the syllables between his teeth and on his tongue. Noting them down on a slip of paper in his head. There are, as it turns out, a fair number more than ten.

The officer coughs, dry and rasping. Corvo has heard this sound before from dying men, and the man _is_ dying. He should in fact have been dead long before now—from blood loss, from shock. Yet he's not. It might be chalked up to pure stubbornness and a healthy dose of surprising bravery, but Corvo doesn't think so. There's something else at work here. Something is keeping his head above those final, all-consuming waters. The shadows in his room are thick, but it's as though they've left their corners and gathered around the two of them like a canopy, like the time-bubble he can create around himself, plunging them into a deeper darkness in which he has no trouble seeing.

Familiar darkness. He's practically at home in it now.

Another cough. “Kill… me,” the man whispers, and pulls together a few more poor scraps of strength. “Please.”

Corvo is opening his mouth to answer—what the response in question will be, he's not entirely sure—when a voice cuts through the darkness, low and flat and icy.

“I want to do it.”

His head snaps up. But he's not startled. He didn't expect this, but he understands in this moment that he should have. Did she do as he told her and go to the safe room? Or did she disobey him and remain in her chambers? He honestly doesn't know, and he also doesn't care. He gazes at her across the expanse of bloodstained floor between them, her small form all black and bone-pale in the first gray hints of dawn drifting through the glass overhead. She steps through the open door—did he leave it open? Or did she open it herself? How long has she been there? What has she seen?—and glides toward him, her bare feet seeming to scarcely touch the ground.

She stops beside him and holds out her hand. “Father.”

Everything in that one word. It pierces him, and he sighs and closes his eyes, and as he hands over the sword, grasping it beneath the hilt, he feels the edge slice into his palm.

She takes it. He shifts aside, drops from his crouch to kneel and rock back on his heels. The sword should probably still be the slightest bit too large for her, but it isn't, and she lifts it with all the practiced skill of a girl who’s been fencing almost since she could walk. With toys, yes. But toys are sufficient where it counts.

The officer stares up at her. There is no relief on his face. There's no fear.

There's only despair.

 _He has seen the future in her eyes,_ whispers the Heart from its chest, close up and in his ear as he watches Emily hack into the man’s neck. Now she does look a bit clumsy, not strong enough to be as efficient as him, but he perceives ways she could improve. It sounds like someone chopping up a melon. The man, his windpipe cut through, makes no sound at all. His body twitches limply with each strike as blood flows sluggishly over his chest. _He has seen the future and he understands where it began. The future of Dunwall. Of Gristol. Of an empire drowning in blood._

 _Empress Emily Kaldwin the Red._

_Are you not satisfied? Even now?_

The man is dead. But Emily is frustrated even after she finally severs the spine, straightening up and breathing hard with the exertion, shooting him an irritated look.

“I thought it would be easy. You make it look that way.”

He wondered how much she had seen. This may be some manner of answer.

“It takes force to behead a man,” he says softly. “And I'm still bigger than you. Stronger.” He reaches out and gently takes the sword from her and lays it down, then takes her hands in his and strokes his thumbs across her knuckles. Her skin is sticky and slick. Her face and dressing gown are flecked with blood. “But you'll grow.”

She exhales and looks down at their joined hands. “I don't want to wait until then.”

“Wait for what?”

She lifts her head and her eyes bore into his. “To do that again.” She pauses, her jaw working. “I want to get better.”

He looks at her for a long time. Doesn't move. Neither does she. Echoing from below, a shrill scream—one of the maids has discovered the bodies. There won't be any difficulty in explaining it all. Claiming an assassination attempt wouldn't even be a lie. Though the officer’s body, he may have to dispose of by other means.

But right now there's her. His daughter, gazing at him with something awful stirring behind her lovely eyes.

Maybe all that bullshit about nature passed down in blood wasn't complete bullshit after all.

 _Even if you tried to deny her, she wouldn't be denied. She would seek it on her own. You have poisoned her. Ruined her_.

Perhaps.

 _I want to get better_.

“Sweetheart,” he murmurs. _My love._ He bends his head, bowing before his Empress, and kisses her red knuckles. “You will.”

 


	9. the sequence ends and begins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, I've been writing a _lot_ of this. As in, I just finished chapter 17. I also have a much better idea where it's going now (I mean, I should hope so, with 17 chapters) and I think I have an ending in sight. 
> 
> And uh, well... Look, I have this thing warned for to hell and back in the tags, and I'm not being secret about the pairing situation, so if you're here I assume you at least kind of know what you're in for, but: shit is going to get _bad,_ folks. Like it's going to get _twisted._ There are some specific things I'm going to warn for in individual chapters even in addition to the tags. All of that shit is still ahead of us, but it's coming. 
> 
> I'm not trying to scare you away, I'm just saying. This thing is horrible. 
> 
> That said, if you're here, I'm very happy about that and I'd love to know what you think, provided that what you think isn't just horrified screaming. ❤️❤️

He's not sure how he would have gone about the practical logistics of demanding that the entire city attend the executions, not least because he's not sure what space could possibly have accommodated them all, but as it turns out he wouldn't have needed to concern himself overmuch.

They come. By the hundreds, in the end perhaps in multiple thousands, they come. Any good and decent folk can always be counted on to turn out for a public bloodletting.

~

Before: It’s quick. Doesn't take more than a day to round them all up. It has to be that fast, and he keeps the membership of the teams that sweep in to take them confined to only the people he's reasonably confident he can trust. Trusting anyone now is a risk—anyone but her, just her—but he recognizes that it's a risk he has to take and keep taking, because as much as he would love it to be so, one man alone can't fulfill all the roles of an army.

He's practically slaughtered armies. Doesn't mean he can be one.

He organizes the teams, organizes the list of names, gives them their orders. A band of cold-eyed men and women; all promoted and groomed for their stations at his hand over the last few years. He knew the instant that Emily took the throne that not only would he have to institute purges but that going forward, he would have to take exquisite care regarding concentric circles of trust. The ones he barely considers reliable but not unreliable enough to get rid of, the ones who seem solid enough but on whom he shouldn't depend in extremis, the ones he concludes he could task with almost anything and have them obey him without question. They owe him everything—their jobs, their incomes, their pensions. The security of their lives. He's seen to it that their families are well-provided for and sworn to keep those families safe and whole if any one of them should fall. It even felt good to make that promise, which he made in good faith and fully intends to keep—he thinks of his mother and how when she received the news that her husband would never come home, there weren't only tears in her eyes. Although she made an effort to hide it, there was fear.

How they would survive, without his pay. Where the money to keep food in their bellies and a roof over their heads would come from.

The chance to keep that from happening to them, people who he believes will serve him well… It’s good. It's good that he can.

There are plenty of things he would still never tell them. They don't know what he did for Sokolov. They don't know the other things he did, when he was gathering that _material_. They certainly can't ever know about the Outsider. But he needs them to be quick and decisive and discreet, and for that, they're perfect.

It has to all be in one day. Preferably all in the span of a few hours. It's a big ask, he knows it, but the longer it takes, the more chance there is of them getting wind of it and slipping away. He waited long enough to shadow them all, establish their patterns of movement. He's made minor adjustments to Watch assignments. He knows where they'll be and when.

 _Take them into custody. Fast and quiet, and keep it clean if possible. I want them all alive and preferably unharmed. At least keep the harm to a minimum, I know sometimes certain things can't be helped_.

A few chuckles at that. Knowing glances exchanged.

These are good people, he believes. Good for him, anyway. But they are not pleasant.

Emily demands to be in the room when he gives them their orders, but in truth he would have had her in there even if she hadn't said anything. Some of it, he tells himself, is that it's time that she faces up to the less lovely things an Empress must be involved in, the uglier commands she has to give. She has to end lives, not only one face-to-face but on a potentially massive scale. She wanted to play at war when she was a child; she never seemed to grasp how much death that involved.

But she already knows so much of that, doesn't she? Didn't she see? Even before the night in his bedroom, didn't she see what he had to do?

In any case, yes, this is her business, and she should be there for it. Give the mission her personal blessing, which surely the teams will also appreciate.

But also it's that he wants to watch her while it happens.

That fascinated, fascinating look in her eyes. Hungry ice descending and consuming a continent. Reshaping the landscape. Hard and inexorable, and focused solely on what its nature demands.

He wants to see that look again. He wants more.

So he watches her, as he lays out what they're to do and the manner in which they're to do it. It's early morning, and the light that pours in through the windows of the empty throne room is as thin and colorless as the pre-dawn light when he watched her make her first kill. _Her first kill_ —he stops at that thought and nearly trails off before he shunts it aside for later consideration and continues.

His voice echoes softly off the smooth, bare walls and the marble floor. The throne room has always had a way of amplifying sound, but he doesn't worry about them being overheard. He scanned the surrounding rooms before he started speaking, looking for uninvited glowing forms and cones of vision-fire. He saw none. A few rats scuttling in corners, going about their rat business.

Listening to him too, possibly.

He speaks. She sits on the throne and watches him in silence, and out of the corner of his eye, he watches her. Her face is impassive, impossible to read, which he finds both frustrating and gratifying. Jessamine knew how to throw up her walls and build them strong and high; stands to reason that her daughter would possess the same talent.

He finishes, dismisses them. The two of them are left alone. He turns to her, and for a long moment she still says nothing.

Then: “You're going to have them all killed.”

He ducks his chin, a single nod. “Of course.”

“How are we going to do it?”

 _We_. Yes. Even if she was a normal empress in normal times, that would be the case. “How do you want to do it?”

She rests her chin on her hand, her dark eyebrows drawn thoughtfully together. He stands where he is and waits for her to finish thinking, and in that time he tries to send himself out in the way he can, extending tendrils of his perception—the orange cast to the world, the sound sliding through the curled interior of his ear. He can _feel_ her that way, he's mildly surprised to find—the warmth of her and the throb of her pulse, almost as if he was touching her. It might be his imagination, only a fancy, but as she considers his question in silence, he would swear that he senses her pulse quickening.

Her eyes, which have focused themselves vaguely on the floor, sharpen and lift to him and fix him in place. “How were they going to kill you when you were in Coldridge?”

 _Ah_. He hasn't told her much about that time but it doesn't make him uncomfortable, thinking of it now, and not just because he's gotten what he would consider adequate vengeance where that particular place was concerned. If anything, thinking back to that first murderous hour after six months of agony is…

It feels good, calling up those memories. Power after so much powerlessness.

“Beheading,” he says simply. Pauses. “The last week, they put me in a cell where I could see the yard. The chopping block.”

What he doesn't tell her: That he stared out that window for hours, stared at the block on its featureless wooden platform until it was all he could see and then until he could see nothing at all, thought of Jessamine’s blood hot and slick on his hands and the weight of her body going limp in his arms as the life seeped out of her and ran into the cracks of the pavilion’s floor, felt the ache of fresh bruises and burns and the tight stretch of skin that was practically one gigantic scar, and asked himself if he wanted to die.

He answered that question, and the answer was not in the affirmative.

But he did want death.

_Maybe it was in that moment, Corvo, the conception of the dark child that is you in this bold new era. Maybe it was when you stepped out of the cell and picked up that sword. Six months of wretched, lonely hell, and you came out of it… how? Did you come out changed? Did you come out wrong?_

_Or did you go in that way?_

Emily frowns deeper. “That was cruel.”

“Yes. It was.” He exhales, slow. “They meant it to be. They were always cruel.”

She doesn't hesitate. She clearly doesn't have to. “I want them beheaded,” she says softly. “All of them.”

He ducks his head again. More of a bow. _It will be done._ It would have been his choice in any case.

“Not in the yard at Coldridge,” she continues, icily calm. Beneath it, he can feel the boiling of her rage—immense and directionless. “In Holger Square. I want everyone to see it. I want them to see so that they all—”

“—So that they all understand what happens to those who plot against you,” he says. The corners of his mouth curl. “Yes, my thoughts exactly.” And Holger Square. Right at the door of the office of the new High Overseer. It's possible that she didn't think of that, of what it would mean, but he would lay down any amount of coin that she did.

She’s sending all kinds of messages to all manner of people.

“I'll see to it,” he says, gives her another quick bow and turns to go. But he's barely taken a step when she says his name, still very quiet, and something in her tone snaps him around as hard and sure as if she seized him by the collar.

It's Jessamine.

His heart ices over, traces frost across the inside of his breastbone, and he stands, breathless and staring. It's Jessamine sitting on the throne, all motionless gazelle-poise as if she could launch herself into a sprint at any time and yet never did, her dark hair piled high and her lips pursed and her gaze sharp as it touches him. It's Jessamine but it's not Jessamine as he ever saw her, because the Jessamine he knew loved her people and cared for them and never would have publicly executed fifteen of them without a trial simply to make a point.

She never would have approved of what he's going to do after they're all taken, which is to send more of the Watch to collect their families.

 _My dearest love. You were good, so good… but you were too naive._

_You trusted, and it killed you._

“I wasn't going to say that they need to understand what would happen if they plot against me,” Emily murmurs. “I was going to say they need to understand what happens if they plot against you.”

He looks at her, once more momentarily speechless. She gazes back at him, and Emily or Jessamine or some impossible blending of the two, it doesn't matter which; he would do anything for her, anything at all, torture and murder and die, because she's absolutely perfect.

 _Love_ doesn't exactly describe what he's feeling now.

“Both of us,” he breathes, and she nods.

They will never take him away from her again.

~

They fill Holger Square. They pack in through every cross street, men and women and childen of all ages—the common rabble on the ground and a few lucky ones peering out from windows and balconies, the nobility and other significant personages arranged on chairs closer around the platform. It's high noon on a hot day, and ladies fan themselves and men wipe their brows with handkerchiefs, and he's guessing that not all of the sweat is due to the heat. A few of the nobles tried to decline their invitations, and it had to be explained to them that doing so was unwise.

Both Ladies Boyle are especially close to the platform. He had the seats reserved specifically for them.

A raised pavilion has been constructed for the Empress and a few of her special guests, including the High Overseer and a visiting envoy from Morley, and of course for her Royal Protector and Spymaster. Sokolov was invited as well, but after months of increasing reclusion he seemed to have left Dunwall in the figurative dead of night, leaving no indication as to his destination. Emily was disappointed but only mildly, and now her attention is entirely fixed on the proceedings. She sits beneath a light, gauzy canopy that blocks the sun but permits the breeze, and she's dressed all in clean white satin, a cream-colored rose pinned to the coil of her hair.

Like she used to dress when she was a child, he thinks. And also _like a bride._

They're lined up, on their knees, hands bound behind their backs and heads uncovered. The others have to watch as one by one they're dragged to their feet and hauled roughly to the block, the masked executioner forcing them down and raising the axe above their extended necks. Emily’s seat has been placed close enough to hear the grunts and the whimpers, and she raises opera glasses to see the sheen of tears on their cheeks. None of them plead, but that's all right; it would have added little anyway.

The glint of a falling blade. Wet thud. As one the crowd gasps. Blood spurting and then pumping weakly as the head rolls away. One of the spurts has enough force to spatter across the faces of the Boyle women, which of course exactly what he was hoping for; they squeak and cringe away and dab at their cheeks, and ruin their white lace hankies.

They claim to live so dangerously. And this is what a little blood does to them.

One after the other. Blood pools on the platform and soaks though the cracks, drips onto the cobblestones. A few of the crowd are weeping. The Morley envoy is finding subtle ways to fix his eyes elsewhere. The High Overseer is shifting uncomfortably in his chair—even he turns out to be squeamish. But Emily never turns her gaze away. She barely seems to blink. She sits, legs crossed and a glass of red wine in her hand, and she isn't smiling but he can see how it wouldn't take more than the smallest twitch of a muscle. Her eyes are smiling. Shining. Almost glowing.

She's beautiful.

She's _perfect_.

And this, this parade of death, is what happens to anyone who defies them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reference to Corvo's time in Coldridge is actually drawing directly on another thing I've written but not yet posted, about his emotional spiral down and back up (after a fashion) over the course of those six months. Not sure when it'll be up but hopefully soon.


	10. in a body without a heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I have eighteen chapters of this now, I can afford to post some of them pretty quickly. 
> 
> Rating change! Yes, we finally have some genuine smut. There is more on the way. 
> 
> Thanks as always for reading. ❤️

Since he was Marked he's known, on one level or another, that he's being watched, but it's never been like this.

He was told as much, it couldn't have been made more explicit to him, but there's every difference in the world between being told a thing and knowing a thing. The Outsider said he would be watching, and Corvo believed him. He always did.

Yet it took this long for him to really _know_.

~

The night after the executions, he sees Emily to bed, and this too is different.

He isn't always involved in her bedtime routines. He’s had essentially nothing to do with them for several years now. When she was much smaller it was far more frequent. Stationed near the door in his official capacity as Royal Protector and listening to Jessamine read aloud to her—the kinds of adventure stories Emily always insisted on, monsters and sea battles and the exploration of exotic lands rather than the more sedate fare that would have been suitable for bedtimes. But Jessamine’s low, musical voice could make even the most exciting stories strangely calming, and now and then, her voice coupled with the dim glow of the lamp would make even his eyelids grow heavy.

Watching Emily fall asleep. Going to her bedside, reaching down to weave his and Jessamine’s fingers together as he bent and kissed his daughter’s brow and tucked the eiderdown up around her shoulders. Some nights singing to her, very softly—he had no particular love for singing but had been told more than once that he wasn't appalling at it—cradle songs he recalled from his own childhood, shanties, old ballads.

Although they were sweet in their melody, those last frequently concerned the topic of murder.

Then the Hound Pits. The room in her tower. Callista turning to him, her expression a mix of pleading and sternness, asking him to go. And Emily twisting in her threadbare sheets, her restless muttering, her face thrown into weird, shifting shadows in the lamplight. The man in her dreams. The one with the black eyes.

_He never said anything, he just came and watched me. Sometimes he was smiling._

_He wants something but he won't tell me what._

It only struck him later that it was odd how Callista chased him out. Why she felt compelled to do so. She might or might not have believed the rumors—so prevalent before everything went to shit—about Emily’s parentage, but either way, Callista would have been well aware of the intensity of the attachment between them. That much was obvious to everyone. Playing with her on the Tower grounds, carrying her on his shoulders, walking with her through the halls, sitting with her while she grudgingly attended to her studies. All far more than a mere bodyguard would need to do. Even a bodyguard with his title.

He never tried to hide it. But it would have been a miserable failure even if he had made the attempt. A quiet one, that Corvo Attano, keeps to himself, says little and sees everything, but when you feel what he felt, when you love someone that _much..._

How was he ever supposed to hide that?

So surely Callista knew. She shouldn't have needed to see them together when he brought Emily back from the Golden Cat, yet even if she somehow hadn't known before, she must have seen it then. He didn't exactly have time to fence with her in the yard Havelock made into his shooting range, didn't have time to play hide and seek with her among the ruins and rocks, but even so, how he was with her. How he held her hand. His hand engulfed hers. He marveled at it and was always so gentle.

And then he went and soaked Kaldwin’s Bridge in a rainstorm of blood.

Callista begged him to go. She was adamant. Far more than she had to be. He thinks back and realizes that there was something else behind her eyes—fear? It might have been. It might also have been reasonable to fear him. He didn't exactly regale the Loyalists with the extravagantly gory details of his missions, but word of the orgy of slaughter in Dunwall was traveling fast by then, and when he returned from what they sent him out to do, they saw his sword and his coat and his hands. Callista would have known that he loved Emily, and she also must have known that he was becoming a monster, because _someone_ had to become one, because he was the only one who could.

So perhaps that was why she was alarmed. Perhaps she merely didn't want to be alone with him.

But he thinks back. And he doesn't believe that was it.

What was Emily dreaming about before he entered the room that night? Had her sleep been as disturbed as he saw? Or was she peaceful before the moment he came to her? Before he brought in those black eyes, the Mark festering in his flesh like an infection?

 _What are you so worried about? Why, do you think I have_ designs _on her?_

Callista knew too much, and it got her killed. But now he’ll admit that it's possible that she knew more than even he was aware of at the time.

Whether or not she _understood_ what she knew is a question to which he'll never receive the answer.

Tonight he sees Emily to bed. No story. No song. As in the old days he's by the door, listening to the water running and splashing in the bathroom, watching her exit in her plain white nightclothes and move across the floor to her bed. The bed is enormous and although she's getting taller by the week, beside it she looks as small as she ever has, climbing into it and pulling up the covers.

Turning to gaze at him. If the lamp wasn't behind her, he would suppose it was that light that's shining in her eyes.

Slowly, he goes to her.

She's staring at him as he lowers himself to one knee—as if he's about to swear an oath. She blinks and otherwise doesn't move, her arm bent beneath the pillow and her other hand curled loosely around the edge of the sheet. A few locks of dark hair have slipped across her cheek and he reaches up and slides them back, his fingertips stroking over her high cheekbone.

She's still motionless. But when one of his fingers grazes her full bottom lip, she speaks.

“Promise me.”

He cocks his head— _promise what?_ —and doesn't withdraw. “Anything.”

She reaches up and curls her small, cool hand around his wrist. Slender hand.

Jessamine’s hand.

“You said I'd get better.” She draws a slow breath. “At killing. You said I would.” Bold girl. He smiles. He's so proud of her. “Promise me you'll teach me. Promise me you'll start soon.”

A whirlwind of blackness in the corner of his vision. _You knew the executions weren't going to be sufficient, Corvo. They were never going to satisfy her. She got to watch, but some other lucky party got to do the actual beheading. You allowed her a taste only, and now she wants the entire dish._

 _You want to give it to her. I think very few things would delight you more at this point_.

 _Although yes, there are still a few._

“I promise,” he whispers, leans in and brushes his lips against the corner of her mouth. As if he was aiming for her cheek and miscalculated the angle. Almost as if that's what happened. “Soon.”

No story, and no song. But that promise is all she needs to fall asleep with a smile on her face.

~

“What's happening to me?”

The Outsider swirls into being beside him. Every single rooftop in Dunwall simultaneously twists into a subtly nightmarish angle. The Wrenhaven runs backward. In the sky, the whales sing.

 _Many things._

Corvo steps forward, gazes down. He's standing on the roof of the Boyle mansion, straddling one of the highest gables. Behind him, the rows of chimney stacks jut up toward the clouds like monstrous teeth. In the garden below, illuminated by strings of ornately decorated paper lanterns, the two surviving Ladies Boyle are derterminedly holding a garden party.

On the way up, he heard snatches of conversation. Nervous, in hushed tones as if the gossipers are afraid that they might be overheard and word get back to unfortunate ears. _Did you see how cold she looked?…that many at once…not even Burrows…unnatural, a girl not even sixteen even if she is an empress…whatever the Royal Protector could be putting into her head…what's next?_

_What's next?_

“I think,” Corvo says softly, “that I'm going to kill the other two.”

 _Yes, I imagine you will._ Chill on the back of his neck, lips moving against his ear. He tilts his head and sighs. _I imagine you're going to kill lots of people._

“What's happening to me?” he asks again, scarcely a breath. Then: “What are you doing to me? To her?”

 _I’m not doing anything. You know that perfectly well._ The Outsider presses closer, reaches down and lifts Corvo’s left hand. The Mark is jagged and brutal in the half light. _All I ever did was give you this. You did the rest all by yourself. You're doing it now. Every second, you make the choice to go on doing it._ Corvo watches, a shiver gathering at the base of his spine, as the Outsider brings his hand to his mouth and kisses the Mark—slow, open-mouthed, just the lightest scrape of teeth. As so many times before, corporeal. Real.

Only now he thinks, with a touch of new wildness: A body he could do things to.

 _So many people would love to believe that I'm some kind of demonic little imp, sitting on their shoulders and whispering horrible urgings into their ears. The Abbey especially—it's so convenient when you can attach the blame for your sins to something other than yourself. But you all choose to be what you are. Always. That includes you, Corvo._ The Outsider seems to waver, and then in a rush he's in front of Corvo, facing him, hands on his chest, pale fingers toying with the buttons of his coat. Boots resting on nothing at all. _At the moment it includes you perhaps more than any other man alive._

Once those fathomless black eyes made him want to flinch, look away. Now he gazes into them and he doesn't blink. “What about her?”

 _She's also making her own choices. But don't lie to yourself—you know the role you're playing there. The power of a father over a child. The influence. You think I have_ intentions _toward her, but my lovely black bird, you're the one with all the intentions now, and you're in deeper than I ever was._

He reaches up and traces the sharp line of the Outsider’s jaw. He watches himself do this like a man entranced, and the Outsider remains where he is and lets himself to be touched, his eyes black slits and the vibration of a hum at the base of his throat. A feline-pleasure sound. It's not as though a corporeal Outsider is an unusual thing at this point, but he doesn't recall it ever being quite so fascinating.

There's a very faint, almost imperceptible line slashed across the skin where a human’s carotid artery would be. Like a scar.

He wonders at it.

_Do you know what I'm really the god of, Corvo?_

He shakes his head. The hollow between the Outsider’s collarbones, where a pulse should beat strong. Nothing. Cold and still. He's filled with the sudden and nearly overwhelming urge to dip his tongue into it, to nip at the well-defined ridges of those clavicles, to map the strange scar-line with his lips.

 _I'm the god of secrets. Of hidden and forgotten things. I'm the god of what people try to bury, what they hope so desperately will never be found. I'm the god of the truth beneath all the pretty stories they tell themselves about what good people they are, and I'm the god of every single soul they've ever beaten into the mud. That's why they say I'm evil. That's why they fear me. I'm the face of what they can't bear to make themselves see. And when I reach out my hand into the world and Mark it, I merely tear down the curtain and reveal what was always there._

_If your daughter wants to be a killer, that's not my doing. And if you want—_

Corvo grasps the Outsider’s jacket and slams their mouths together.

It should be precarious, teetering on the very edge of a roof like this. It isn't. There's no teetering; it might as well be level ground, and Corvo dimly senses, not for the first time, that when the Outsider is with him no natural laws fully apply to him. The rest of him senses nothing except that familiar wonderful cold, the lips working against his and nails raking over his scalp and his own hands gripping the Outsider’s upper arms so hard that he would be leaving bruises if bruises were possible.

But if he feels strong, it's only because the Outsider is allowing him to feel that way.

And only briefly. Because all at once it's as if a carriage has run straight into him and he's being hurled backward by a purely inhuman force, his back striking the base of one of the chimney stacks and jarring the breath from his lungs. Instinctively he struggles but the Outsider is strong, strong far beyond muscle and bone, and Corvo gasps and his head falls back with a thud against the concrete as the Outsider bites at his jaw and drags his teeth lower.

As usual, it's not kissing so much as _fighting_. Only far more aggressive than it has been before, more force, more of something almost like anger. It might feel like fencing, the way their bodies move together, against each other, only there's no real precision in it, no strategy or plan. Except now Corvo is beginning to intuit how there might be, yanking the Outsider’s head back up and thrusting his tongue into that icy mouth, sucking at his lips and rolling helplessly forward against the leg suddenly pushed between his thighs. If they took a little more time, if they were a little less frantic, it could be smoother, easier, not nearly as clumsy.

But maybe he doesn't want smooth or easy. Maybe he wants to grind his straining erection against the Outsider’s upper thigh and lash back with everything he has, groaning over the discordant jangle of the music. Maybe he wants to insinuate his hand between them and palm the hard length he finds there and swallow the little hiss of angry pleasure it earns him.

He's always the one who's been touched. This... This is new. 

_So he does have a cock after all,_ he thinks with mad amusement, and then it's a fumbling mess of hands, groping at each other and squeezing through too much fabric. _I wonder if it's as crooked as they say._

Fingers clenched around his wrist then, fierce enough to hurt, holding his hand between them, locking it there, and a harsh whisper against his throat.

 _Get me off._

It's not a request. And he doesn't want to argue with it.

It should be distasteful, all this cold, lips and tongue and reaching into the Outsider’s trousers and curling his fingers around silky, rigid flesh as chilled as the rest of him. But it's not, and he moans when he draws it out like he's touching himself, grips and strokes and breathes a laugh when the Outsider rocks against his hand. Because it's always been him in this position so far, trembling and burning and needy while this _god_ —who’s at this moment fucking his fist—remains coolly aloof and only as involved as he wants to be.

The Outsider is pinning him in place, kissing the air out of his lungs, and could snap his bones like twigs if he cared to do so. But now this god is the one who _wants._

There's no move on the Outsider’s part to return the favor. His free hand is occupied with Corvo’s hair again, yanking so viciously that Corvo’s eyes water and he whines with pain—which does nothing to wilt his erection; if anything it does the opposite—and his other hasn't loosened its hold on Corvo’s wrist one iota. Yet it doesn't feel as if it matters. Corvo is so hard he's aching with it, humping awkwardly and uselessly against the heel of his own palm, but when he attempts to maneuver his other hand between them, the Outsider seizes it and accompanies it with another bite, cruel enough to make him whine.

_No. Not you. Not this time._

And it doesn't matter. Because there's weakness concealed under that icy steel. Because if the Outsider can want anything like this…

If the Outsider can want completion. Which apparently he can; the unsteady rhythm of his hips is speeding up, even less steady, and he's hissing words Corvo can't make out in between those furious kisses, the dark surging all around them in a symphony of whispers and the forced laughter from the party rising to a cackling scream.

Corvo might as well not even have a cock at all, it's so utterly absorbing watching the Outsider come.

He's not human. He's never been remotely human. He's not human now, but when he arches and whips his head back and bares his teeth in a twisted, silent grimace at the sky, through the explosion of whirling darkness all around them Corvo could swear he perceives glimpses of… something.

Wanting. Being human enough to want.

And the come spilling all over his hand is _hot_.

All at once the Outsider releases every bit of tension against him and loosens, nearly stumbles, breathing in shallow pulls into the hollow of Corvo’s throat. Surely not needing anyone to hold him up, but as Corvo’s wrists slip free he finds himself holding him up anyway, arms circled around him. All that inhuman strength in such a deceptively delicate frame.

It hurts in a way nothing else has.

Flutter of a laugh against his jaw, and then that delicate frame is pushing away from him, tucking his cock back into his fly and buttoning up, straightening his jacket. Corvo looks down at the semen glistening on his fingers, looks up again.

The Outsider touches his own lips—with a curious air, as if he doesn't quite understand what he's been doing with them. They're shining and swollen. As if there's actually blood in his veins.

 _Maybe I should ask what you're doing to me._ Bemusement. Cool bemusement… but perhaps not as cool as it has been. _That was… different._

Corvo wipes his hand on his trousers, for lack of anything else to do with it. “I didn't know you could do that.”

The Outsider looks almost as if he's about to say something else, but it flits away from his face and vanishes. Somewhere in him, a door has closed. _Now you do know._

Corvo starts to smile—and that frighteningly powerful hand flies out and clamps around his throat, shoves him back and nearly lifts him off his feet, and he should be trying to struggle again, should be clawing for air and freedom… and he isn't.

The abyssal eyes drilling into his are terrifying.

 _Abuse that knowledge and you’ll learn what it means to regret something._

The hand disappears. Corvo staggers forward, coughing and wondering vaguely whether he’ll have some interesting new bruises tomorrow, and wondering why he doesn't mind that prospect at all.

The Outsider turns away from him and regards the world beyond the rooftop, his hands folded serenely at the small of his back… as if nothing ever happened. Another moment or two and Corvo joins him, drops to one knee and stares down at the seething mass of nobility, reading up to absently massage his neck.

His cock is still throbbing between his legs, and the edge of pain is sweet.

“I'm not going to kill them tonight,” he murmurs. His voice is a hoarse croak. “I'm going to save them. For later.”

 _For when it's right. Yes. I know what_ —who— _you're saving them for. A late birthday present, possibly. Or an early one. These things always depend on one’s point of view._

Corvo glances up. The Outsider isn't looking at him, isn't even really looking at the party or the city; he's gazing at something Corvo can't see, his black eyes enormous, an awful little smile playing around his swollen mouth.

 _You know, I think perhaps part of me would have wished that you had chosen a different path._ His smile widens. He's beginning to disintegrate at the edges. The Wrenhaven is returning to its regular course.

 _But given that you chose this one, I'm going to enjoy the show._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is probably where I started to get the sense that Something Interesting is happening and in ways I didn't expect. I'll be going into that more later in the story but two "hey wait what about X" thoughts smacked into me here. 
> 
> 1\. That scene with Callista. What was up with that scene? Why _was_ she so eager to chase Corvo out? As far as I know she'll do that regardless of whether or not you're playing high chaos, so I think it's probably just slightly iffy writing... but for the sake of overthinking things, what if something else was going on? Callista is such an interesting character and we really never get to know much about her, but she's clearly thoughtful and insightful and she's not a fool. What did she see? What did she know? What had her so worried that night?
> 
> 2\. The Outsider is not being written the way he was when I started this. I think it's subtle enough and behind-the-scenes enough that there's no real jarring mismatch between later and earlier chapters, but it's the result of me thinking and learning more about him as I've continued, and revising my understanding of him as I've gone on. 
> 
> It's so easy to fall into interpreting him as a creature who really does just want a good show, no matter whether or not the show is horrible and bloody, and in fact regards bloody chaos as far more entertaining than mercy and peace. But clearly the subsequent games have indicated that that's not so much the case - he's not a tempter, and he's not a trickster god. And he doesn't lie; his nature is the very antithesis of lies. Corvo is doing _nothing_ under his influence that he probably wouldn't be doing anyway, given the means and opportunity. The Outsider didn't make him evil (and he basically is); something else did (what exactly did make him evil is a whole other question). 
> 
> The Outsider isn't trying to _make_ Corvo do anything, other than face who he really is and embrace it in all its horror. If he didn't genuinely believe that Corvo was already like this - and worse - he'd be leaving him alone. 
> 
> There's another interesting thing I ended up accidentally hinting at here, in fact, regarding who is actually influencing whom and in what direction that influence is flowing. But that'll be more important later on. 
> 
> (I actually only picked up on that as an important Thing a few chapters hence, the fact is that anything remotely clever I end up doing tends to be unintentional.)
> 
> Goddammit, I can't just _write some trash_ without it turning into a bunch of thinky thoughts, it's vexatious.


	11. the rules have changed, the lines begin to blur

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been attaching a bit of Nine Inch Nails to this fic. As one might do. [Such as.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1uaGkwmDa0)
> 
> ❤️

Soon. But not immediately.

He promised her. He intends to keep that promise, with everything in him, with everything he could possibly be. He always loved her, every moment with her was beyond precious and the sheer density of his love far outweighed any value he placed on his own life, but what he feels now—since that night in his chambers—is different.

It burns inside him. It's as jagged and brutal as the Mark. It treads along that sweet edge of pain. He realizes four days later, while accompanying her to a private reception for perfumed diplomats from Serkonos and Tyvia, that while he can gaze into the Outsider’s eyes and not experience so much as the vaguest impulse to look away, he can't bring himself to face this directly. It frightens him.

Something still can.

_I’m the god of secrets. Of hidden and forgotten things. I’m the face of what they can't bear to make themselves see._

She accepts their credentials. They take her hand and bow over it, kiss her signet ring. He doesn't miss the tension in her arm; she's more and more aware of her hands, how people keep touching them in all manner of official capacities, clasping and kissing and squeezing and clutching, and she doesn't like it.

He studies them through narrowed eyes and imagines cutting their fingers off one by one. For daring to impose themselves on her. For daring to touch her.

She always loved when he held her hands.

The diplomats depart to take tea and cakes on one of the garden terraces. He's left alone with her, and for a moment she looks at him in silence. The day is overcast and the light in her study is washed out and flat. Everything appears the slightest bit unreal.

Still wordless, she turns away from him. But before she does, he catches the hard glint in her eyes. She's not angry with him, not yet, but she's growing impatient.

And he realizes something else, as she dismisses him with a wave of her hand and he bows and leaves her. Which is that he's enjoying making her wait. He's enjoying drawing it out, glimpsing the thirst that the impatience is masking. Some of it might be that he's testing her, seeing just how deep in her this goes. But also it's for the pure pleasure of it.

She can command him, and there's so much pleasure in obeying her. But he has something she wants.

He has that power over her.

So he'll make her wait.

~

And also, first things first.

Three terse weeks later, he rouses her before sunrise and gives her a brusque order to dress and leads her, yawning and grumpily rubbing her eyes, out to the practice yard. She's less grumpy the second she steps onto the packed earth, and when he turns to her and studies her in the dim colorlessness, she's fully awake, and those formerly sleepy eyes are glittering like cut gems.

He goes to a table set to the side and picks up the sword he laid there. Turns back to her and profers it. She hesitates a fraction of a second, then reaches out and takes it from him, examining it.

It's nearly the size of his. A bit shorter, and the edge is blunted—a common practice weapon. She returns her gaze to him, shifts it to the folded blade at his belt, frowns. She doesn't have to say it: she considers this disparity in weaponry unjust.

His mouth quirks. “You didn't think I was going to give you mine.”

She lifts the sword, sweeps it through the air. Again, not unskilled; she's clearly not accustomed to the weight and the heft but she already knows the basics, and perhaps more. “I thought—” She shakes her head. “Never mind. What now?”

A twitch of his wrist and his own sword is in his hand; another minute twitch and it unfolds with a click, cutting into the air as it opens. Immediately and smoothly, he slides into an opening stance. She blinks at him, faintly confused, and he levels the point at her.

His blade is not blunt.

“Defend yourself.”

She tries. It's a bad try. He charges and she makes a desperate attempt to guard, but he slices straight through and she stumbles, hopelessly off-balance, and stars help her, she actually _drops her sword_ when he slashes and finishes with the edge pressed against her throat.

She gapes at him with enormous dark eyes. Her expression is bewildered.

Then betrayed.

“You're dead.” He steps back and resumes his stance. Gestures at the sword lying in the dust. “Pick it up.”

She gives him a scowl and bends to do so. This time he stops the blade just at the nape of her neck, plants his boot on the ridge of her shoulder and kicks her down. She goes sprawling with a harsh little cry, and for an instant the wounded shock on her face completely overwhelms the anger.

When she gropes for the sword and pushes herself up, he steps back again and allows her to do so. She glowers up at him, swiping loose hair away from her face.

“That wasn't fair.”

“Yes, and of course the people you fight will always be fair to you.” He's struggling to conceal a smile. Not that he shouldn't smile now, but abruptly he's certain that this is a smile she shouldn't see. How much he's finding that he likes this. How good it feels to see her on the ground this way.

How good it felt to put her there.

“You didn't even give me a chance,” she protests, and he barks a short, contemptuous laugh.

“I'm sorry, did you think we were still playing? You want to cut off a man’s head, you don't get to be a little girl anymore.” He levels the sword. “ _Defend_ _yourself_.”

This time it's better. She manages to turn aside the lunge and scrambles to her feet—and yes, it's mostly because he lets her—retreats a couple of yards and when he advances she attempts to launch an attack of her own. He deflects it with a casual flick, as if he's shooing away a troublesome insect, and again stops his slash just at the point where the edge touches her neck.

“You're dead.”

He always held back with her—she was a little girl then—but she's seen him when he truly spreads his wings. She knows perfectly well what he's capable of. But the difference between seeing what he does with his targets and being his target herself is massive, and she's utterly wrong-footed, frantically trying to find her center, and he refuses to give it to her, driving her into clumsy retreat after clumsy retreat with relentless thrusts of his body as the sun begins to solidify the shadows in the yard and makes the sweat beading on her skin glisten.

The edge against the juncture of her neck and shoulder. “You're dead.”

The point of the blade against her breastbone. “You’re dead.”

Dancing around her before she has a chance to follow him, kicking the legs out from under her, jamming his knee against her spine and pressing the sword into her ribs. “You're dead.”

Disarming her with a casual slap of the flat against her wrist, seizing her by the hair and yanking to the side as she cries out, and once more the edge firm against her throat. “Emily, your head is on the fucking _ground_.”

He flings her away and she staggers… and manages to stay up. He feels a ripple of pride—a ripple that becomes an icy wave when she hurls herself on her fallen sword and whips around, brings it up just in time to block him. She's on her back, and as he makes for a second attack her boot flies out and hits him squarely in the shin and sends him backward with a harsh grunt of pain.

He gazes down at her. She's flipped herself to one knee, her placement much better, her sword still raised to guard against the next blow, her muscles loose enough to either adjust the angle of her guard or roll away if she can't deflect. Strands of hair are plastered to her brow and temple. Her teeth are bared in a furious snarl. When the first shaft of sun hits them, her eyes are dark fire.

He looks at her and every muscle in his body quivers. The string of a guitar caressed by a single finger.

He pulls in a deep breath, eases the pace of his breathing and feels his heart slow. “Good. That's good.” He folds the sword, reaches down a hand to her. She eyes it warily and doesn't take it.

And that's good as well.

He withdraws his hand and drops to a crouch in front of her, regarding her with his head slightly cocked. “You don't trust me.”

Her lips twist. “You haven't exactly given me any reason to.”

“That's not true.” He flips the folded sword over and over, spinning it between his fingers. “I could have killed you at least ten times. I didn't.”

She huffs a bitter laugh and scrubs a hand over her face, leaving smears of dirt on her cheeks. It only makes her more beautiful. “That's funny. You're very funny, Corvo.”

He's perceiving a pattern in the circumstances under which she calls him by each name.

“You can't trust the people you go up against. Not ever. They won't be merciful. They won't hold back. You're fighting to live now.”

“I wanted to fight to kill.”

“If you can't keep yourself alive, you'll never get that far. Or do you want to confine yourself to mostly-dead men with no legs or hands? Bound prisoners?” His mouth pulls into a sneer. “That's pathetic.”

She exhales and, in a gesture so suddenly childish it disorients him, slams the pommel of the sword against the ground. Dust puffs up and dances in the light. “Why are you _being_ this way?”

“Because you're _not a fucking child,_ ” he hisses, lunging forward so fast she flinches with a small gasp, and the alarm flashing across her face fills him with a surge of savage pleasure. “You want this? No half-measures. I won't coddle you. I won't be _nice_ to you. That world out there?” He snaps the sword open and stabs it at the wall between the yard and the city. “The one you want to strike at? It's not nice either. You know that. It’s barbaric. It’s hateful. It's _cruel_.” He stops. He's nearly panting again, and he briefly shuts his eyes as he folds the sword and lowers it. “If I have to be cruel to you in its place, to prepare you for it, I'll do it. I'll do it for you.”

“I didn't ask you to do that,” she whispers.

“You did.”

She gazes mutely at him, her lips parted and moving very slightly, as if she's searching for words that won't come. He notices, only now, the smear of blood at the corner of her mouth.

“I told you,” he says slowly. Softly. “You want to confine yourself to men who can't fight back? Who can't even run? That's your choice. But I won't help you with that. If you want to kill, you're going to fucking work for it. You're going to earn every drop of blood you spill.”

“Like you,” she murmurs, and her tone is all revelation.

He smiles thinly. “Like me.”

She's quiet for a moment. Then, dawning across her face like the sun now pouring ruddy gold into the yard, a smile as thin and sharp as his. “I always did want to be like you, didn't I?”

He affixes the sword to his belt, takes her flushed face in his hands and kisses her forehead. Her dirt-streaked cheeks. Gently, so gentle and so chaste, her mouth.

When he licks his lips he tastes her blood.

She sighs and leans into his touch, and for a breath of a moment he lets her rest there, his brow against hers and his fingers combing through her damp hair. High above them, the kingsparrows are singing their cascading morning songs.

Abruptly he releases her and straightens, and without offering to help her up, he turns and begins striding swiftly away across the yard. “We’re done for the day,” he calls over his shoulder. “Tomorrow morning. Same time. If you aren't here, I'll drag you out of bed by your hair.”

She doesn't see his vicious grin. But cold black eyes do.

~

The room stinks of blood.

For a moment he merely stands and gazes down at what he's done, the tableau he's constructed in the anemic lamplight. At the scatter of broken glass across the pitted floorboards, the whiskey soaking into the torn scrap of rug. At the blood splashed across the peeling wallpaper, stark red against a faded pattern of climbing vines like blooming roses. At the man’s body crumpled half over a splintered chair, his hand clenched around the grip of his pistol and his other arm outstretched as if he's still trying to crawl away.

Or as if he's reaching for his head, which rests a few feet from him, eyes wide and white and locked into the final expression of his terror.

He's missing both his ears. If one made a cursory search, they might find them stuffed into his mouth.

Corvo releases a slow breath, lets his head fall back between his shoulders and for a few seconds his eyelids flutter closed.

_Do you think they'll believe it was a spat between gangs? More Hatters and Bottle Street unpleasantness?_ The Outsider crosses his arms and tilts his head thoughtfully. _Because I frankly wonder. This is a bit extravagant for even the worst of them._

“No one will give a shit about him,” Corvo murmurs.

_Really? Because I think the Hatters might_.

“And I should care about that why?”

The Outsider shrugs. _No particular reason. Only if they get punchy enough, things might get even more unpleasant._ He sucks air in through his teeth, shakes his head. _A nasty business, gang wars. You know that better than most_.

Corvo lifts his sword, turns it. The congealing blood spread across the blade looks almost black. “People get killed.”

_Indeed they do._ Rising whispers as the Outsider falls apart and reassembles himself in front of Corvo, absently side-stepping the severed head. _One might suppose it would make good cover for a string of unrelated murders. Wouldn't that be reasonable? Hide crimes within crimes. But you._ His lips curl. _I don't think that's it for you. I don't think you're interested in hiding anything._

Corvo reaches out with his clean hand, his Marked hand, and spreads it against the Outsider’s chest. He's very close. “What do you think it is for me?”

_I think you love the chaos. I think you revel in it. You tried your hand at reasonable governance, at cultivating_ peace and prosperity, _and you found that it bored you. You stopped the return of the plague for her, and without question you'd do it again, but I think you'd love to see her Empire go up in flames._ The Outsider reaches up, lays his hand over Corvo’s—and Corvo gasps when he hooks his nails into the Mark. _You were reborn into a nightmare, Corvo. And now you don't want it to end. Because within that nightmare, you're at home._

Once he might have argued with this. But those days are so far gone that he barely remembers them. Now a quiet moan slips out of him as the Outsider scratches him even harder, and when he lowers his gaze to his hand, the lines of those scratches across the Mark are glowing a faint but undeniable blue-white.

What if he cut into it? Stripped the skin off? What would he find?

How deep does it go?

_You know, it's funny to me._ The Outsider leans in and slightly up, cool lips moving against his mouth. He smells like the ocean wracked by a storm. _The first morning in the yard with her all those weeks ago, you told her that this world was barbaric, that it was cruel. You said it as if it was a bad thing. But you're out here night after night, hard at work to keep it that way._

His other hand slides between them and down to Corvo’s groin, cupping him, kneading, and Corvo cants his hips forward with a heavier moan. This is another thing he would no longer even attempt to resist.

It feels too fucking good to resist any of it.

_If she knew how much you love it,_ the Outsider purrs. _Dear Corvo, your cock was hard before I ever came to you tonight. You were hard even before you took his head off._ Suddenly he lays his hands against Corvo’s shoulders and shoves, and Corvo stumbles and drops his sword and falls awkwardly into the remaining intact chair, and he blinks and the Outsider is standing over him.

_Stop trying to pretend you're better than you are._ He nods at Corvo’s erection. _Look at what you did, and do what we both know you really want to do._

He does.

His bloody hand is shaking as he unbuttons his fly and reaches in, and he twitches when he curls his fingers around his shaft and pulls it out and gives himself a slow, slow stroke. Shifts his focus from those unbearable black eyes to the scene he's created, the blood and the fear and the death, and strokes himself again. Again. Faster.

_Good,_ the Outsider breathes. _Oh, that's very good._ And there's a taut quality in his voice that catches Corvo’s attention and he looks, and the Outsider has his hand curled around his own cock, hissing as he tightens his grip.

Corvo looks at what he did. He looks, soaks it in, and with ever-increasing speed he jerks himself off as his and the Outsider’s mingling groans fill the room like the metallic stink of the blood. That blood everywhere, the way it sprayed across the wall at the first slash, the scream cut off with such wonderful suddenness, the feel of the flesh yielding under his blade—weight on his leg, settling, and he tears his gaze away from the room and stares up at the god straddling his thigh and pressing close, near enough that their knuckles collide as they move.

_Keep looking,_ the Outsider hisses, and teeth drag down Corvo’s jaw as he looks and rushes toward the edge. Over and over it's unfolding in front of him, blooming like those bloody roses: The twisted face, the gun lifting, the flash of the sword, the terror and the scream and the blood, again and again and _again_ until at the apex of one final scream he's stiffening and convulsing, pulsing hot over his fist, and the Outsider is laughing and snapping his teeth closed at the base of Corvo’s throat and ripping a strangled cry out of him as the last waves of his climax crash against the rocks in his head.

The mark on his neck will linger for days.

He’s too dazed to catch the Outsider’s orgasm when it happens. But he knows that not all the come on his hand is his own.

And of course then he's alone. Gazing at the murder he's committed for no reason other than the pleasure of it, his cock softening in his sticky bloodstained hand.

In the Hound Pits, he wondered if he was sick. He isn't wondering that anymore. He knows.

If he wasn't sick, he would care.

 


	12. nothing more than you can feel now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to say again that it really is extraordinarily gratifying that any of you are still reading this at all. ❤️ Oh boy just wait tho
> 
> (God, the contrast between this and my other primary corvosider thing just keeps getting more and more extreme and it's kind of hilarious to me)

Chaos rises like thunderheads beyond the Tower walls, and little Emily learns how to kill.

Not so little anymore. She's just past sixteen now, and the last shreds of the child in her are gone. He's torn them out of her. Beaten them out, carved her free of them, and in time she's become nothing short of enthusiastic with regard to her participation in her own surgery.

The first few months with her in the practice yard were difficult for both of them—she was constantly surly, resistant, complaining no matter how ferociously he punished her. And he did punish her. He said he would be cruel and he was, he has been every single time, and the pleasure he took in his own cruelty and in her resulting pain proved to have a relatively short half life. After it faded he was merely frustrated, pushing her further and further, driving her ahead of him like the drunken lord whipping his horses. The more obstinate she was, the more brutal he became. Until one particularly trying morning they paused for a few minutes of rest, and he sat in the dust and looked at her as she wiped blood and sweat from her scraped cheek and realized it came down to one simple thing.

He was trying to break her.

One must be careful in how one goes about such a task.

So after that he was more patient. His cruelty was more calculated, more precisely aimed. He returned to what he had—semi-knowingly—been doing that first morning, and stoked her fury. Instead of angry he was coldly scornful. Instead of heated he was remote. And what he discovered then was that in response she turned to making attempts at goading _him,_ because she missed his anger and she yearned for his heat, and he laughed in the dark silent caverns of his mind and loved her so desperately it almost drove him mad.

It did drive him mad. It is.

He was mad already.

Until finally two months ago he got what he wanted from her, _finally_ she gave it to him, and in a sudden storm of rage more intense than anything he had yet seen, she turned aside an especially fierce attack and twisted it, hurled his momentum back at him and then hurled herself, the point of her sword aimed directly at his heart, and blunt or not, if she had managed to strike it home she might very well have killed him.

She didn't strike home. She ended up as she had so many times—flat on her back in the dirt, gasping for the wind he knocked out of her. But this time as soon as she recovered it she was on her feet and coming at him, the sword forgotten where it fell and all her trained finesse gone, and she _slammed_ into him, screaming and beating at him in a wild flurry of clenched fists.

She was clumsy and unbalanced and it should have been easy to fight her off. Somehow it wasn't. Somehow the ground slid out from under his boots and they went down together, and the world shattered into a kaleidoscope of fractured sunlight and shadow and she seemed to be hitting him from all sides, nearly overpowering him though she was still less than two thirds his size, and then the world made another of those sickening lurches and he found her on her back again and himself on top of her, straddling her, pinning her wrists to the ground beside her head. She was sweaty and filthy, her chest was heaving and her teeth were bared in that familiar glorious snarl as she stared up at him, and in her eyes he saw utter hatred.

He could have wept for the joy of it. For the love of her.

“Good,” he gasped, and she let out a choked, enraged sound and struggled uselessly under him, and he held her down. He was braced over her, near enough to smell the tang of her sweat. The puff of her breath against his neck. Her heat, easily matching whatever she wanted from him.

And before he hid it from himself, he saw in a brilliant, terrible flash what he might do.

He hadn't taken the Heart from the chest for many weeks. He hadn’t even heard her voice. But he knows it wasn't his imagination, the despairing scream that came to him then. So high above him and so distant, but muffled by nothing.

_She's your daughter, Corvo. For the sake of anything good left in you, she’s your DAUGHTER._

He squeezed her wrists. Later she would have rings of bruises there like purple bracelets. They were only two of many bruises he's given her. “Can you behave?”

She spat at him. “Fuck you.”

The spittle landed warm on his throat. He ignored it. “Good,” he said again, and she released another one of those snarls.

“What the fuck do you mean, _good?_ ”

He smiled at her. He couldn't help it. He was too proud of her. He loved her too much. “You just came closer to killing me than you ever have. Do you realize that? Do you know how good I am? You must. You've seen it. Emily, _hundreds_ have gone up against me and failed, and you almost took me down.” _My love, my precious darling, if you could comprehend how much I adore you_. “You're angry. That's what gave you the edge, until you lost control of it. Use it. Hone it. It's a weapon. _You_ are a weapon. Not your sword. You.”

She stared up at him in silence, still breathing hard. But slower. He could feel her beginning to loosen, to yield—and he was almost disappointed. Yet it wasn't gone, the fire laced through her marrow. He sensed it smoldering beneath her skin, glowing through her pores and flickering behind her eyes.

_Once lit, Corvo, the only thing that can snuff out a fire like that is death._

~

The Outsider is always with him now.

They walk together at night, through the halls and passages. They fly across the rooftops. He observes Corvo in the yard with Emily, circling like an interested spectator at a hound fight, occasionally offering his mocking applause. He stands with black flames licking around his form and watches as Corvo does what he does. With his sword. With the rats. With the crossbow. Sometimes with his bare hands. Not every night, but it's happening more frequently. He needs it more often to quell the dry itch that gnaws at him on quiet nights. He isn't sorry. He feels no pity. It's flesh. It's meat. He plays with it, cuts it apart until it stops screaming, and then he cuts more just for the fun of it.

He hunts. He likes it when they run. He likes it best when they try to fight. He often takes care to pick strong ones. Now and then he even allows them to believe, for a fraction of a second, that they might win.

There was indeed a gang war, not long after he killed the first of a long string of Hatters and Bottle Street boys. It raged for four months. The days when he went to such lengths to stop the resurgence of the plague feel like another life lived by another man— _although it was for her, it was only ever for her_ —but for all the darkness growing in her, Emily still cares, and on his advice she directed the City Watch to crack down hard in an effort to stem the tide. As he anticipated, it only caused that tide to swell. People muttered fearfully that it was as bad as it had been under Burrows. Worse. Beatings were indiscriminate. Innocents and bystanders died. Bodies piled up. The Bottle Street Gang spewed their fire over the city and buildings burned. Every time it seemed like the fire might burn itself out, Corvo picked up his sword and bled the Void through the Mark and fed it just a bit of fuel. Just enough.

_Chaos._

He revels.

He did finally allow it to end. Except for some tensions with Morley— _always_ Morley, now and then he spins the globe in Emily's study and considers the merits of simply wiping it off the map if that could ever be done—everything was quiet for a while. Except now something new was prowling the streets and the blood was still spilling, and in pubs and marketplaces and warehouses and parlors people were murmuring in tense undertones about what they had given a name to, because people will name a thing in a foolish attempt to make it less terrifying.

_The Dunwall Butcher._

He doesn't much care for it. The Outsider notes that it's not terribly imaginative and he agrees.

As far as he's able to determine, Emily doesn't know. Or she doesn't know the full extent of what he's done. What he’s doing.

But. _Part of her senses what you are._ And he's fully aware that it's only a matter of time.

He is, in fact, counting on it.

The Outsider is always with him now. Corvo has no idea whether it would be accurate to call him a friend. A companion? A confidant? A partner in extremely hideous crime?

A lover?

Many might say so, given the things the Outsider sometimes does to him. The things they do to each other. Only those harsh, bestial kisses and rough groping hands, at least so far, but years ago the Heart cautioned him to not dare to think that this is the end, and it's counsel he's taken…

Well. To heart.

But the Outsider is none of these things. He's the Outsider.

Then one night he comes to Corvo’s bed, and things change again.

 


	13. you'd better learn your lesson well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alone in his bed, Corvo lies sleepless and thinks of Daud, entertains a guest... and makes a very bad mistake. And suffers the consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I believe that I need to issue a word of caution here (yes, even for this fic): THERE IS A RAPE SCENE IN THIS CHAPTER. It is lengthy. It is explicit. What it's _not_ is a rape scene between Corvo and Emily. Granted this is all very horrible but one thing I'm committed to doing is making whatever sinful debauchery occurs between them at the very least enthusiastically consensual. 
> 
> Like, horrible, but consensual. 
> 
> If this sounds like it might be too upsetting for you, I think you can skip the entire scene (which occurs in the middle of the chapter, you'll see it coming way ahead of time and can jump down to the ~ which marks the end of it) without hurting your ability to follow the plot. That's not to say it's gratuitous, because I genuinely don't think it is, but someone could squeak by without reading it if they needed to. 
> 
> I'm guessing that if you're still here (WHY) you can _probably_ read it without harm, but we're all upset to different degrees by different things and I don't want to smack anyone in the face in a bad way. 
> 
> As usual, thanks so much for being here and I always want to know what you think. ❤️

Sometimes he still thinks of Daud.

It doesn't happen often. It didn't before he began his inexorable slide down into the living Void he now happily inhabits, and it doesn't now that he's there. But now and then Daud does slip back into his mind—very much unlike how he left the world, crumpled and coughing blood and gazing up at his executioner with eyes that were both unsurprised and unafraid.

He asked for his life, yes. He never expected to receive it.

Corvo supposes he respects that kind of realism.

Why he thinks of Daud, he's never certain. He simply does, unbidden and frankly unwanted, faintly resentful of this man who insists on occupying space in Corvo’s mind instead of doing as he should and remaining dead and quiet. One might expect that Corvo would remember him more frequently as he first saw the man, on the day Daud sent the whole of Corvo’s life spiraling into the abyss from which it's never returned and from which, indeed, he no longer wishes it to. One might expect that he would remember those final, fatal seconds, the awful rigid numbness in his limbs as he hung in the air like a puppet, as Daud tore through the world in front of her, struck her, seized her, and with his blade took her away forever.

The difference between these days and those earlier ones is that when he does think of that day, he's no longer angry. He simply observes.

It happened. He can't change it now.

No sense in getting too bent out of shape about it.

And in any case it's hardly ever that. Almost without exception, when he thinks of Daud he thinks not of the first day but of the last. Of the instant of his vengeance, of course, but more and more, on the rare occasions when his thoughts drift in this direction—or when Daud drifts into them—it's what came before. Standing in the ruins in front of this man, the man whose face had haunted both his dreams and his nightmares for over half a year, the man for whom he had spent that half year nurturing hatred heavier and darker and more ravenous than he would have ever believed he was capable of, and he treasured each second of violence that followed as a jewel on a strand, fit to lay around the neck of an empress.

But before those seconds crystallized—or not long after they began, he's no longer sure which—there was a moment where he threw his mind forward as he had learned to do, shot it at Daud’s skull like a bolt from his crossbow… and slammed up against a wall he hadn't known could exist.

 _Nice try, Corvo—but inside my mind is the last place you want to be._

He's been fingering those glittering beads of memory. But now all at once he hears the words in that voice he’ll never be able to forget although it spoke no more than a handful of sentences to him before he silenced it forever, and he throws back his head and shakes with wild, silent laughter.

Oh, Daud. So self-important. So sure of his own corruption. Whatever Corvo didn't glean from their minimal conversation, he picked up clearly enough in the journal he perused afterward. The man considered himself a monster at the end, held that opinion of himself with utter conviction. When he erected that impenetrable wall between his mind and Corvo’s and spoke those words, it sounded almost like a boast. _Look upon me. Behold how repulsive I am, behold the horror beyond reckoning of my many sins_.

He didn't know. He had no fucking _idea_.

_Should we consider him your second father, Corvo?_

Daud was unsurprised when Corvo killed him. Corvo is unsurprised to hear this voice now, and his attitude is languid when he sits up, the sheets draped around his waist and the air cool on his bare skin, and gazes into the dimness. The fire hasn't yet entirely gone out, and the last of the glow throws the rest of the room into shadows that flutter and swirl like wind-stirred leaves.

Shadows that collect, coalesce, and whisper across the floor to solidify beside the bed. So familiar, that slender form. Comfortable by now. He not only meets those black eyes without wavering; he sinks into them like a man lowering himself into a warm bath. He swims in that cold. He drifts.

The Outsider is constantly with him, but doesn't often visit him in his chambers these days. He wonders if this is a special occasion.

 _Well? Do you think we should? He did birth you, after a fashion. Burrows, Campbell, Havelock, countless others… They had a hand in your raising. They helped to shape what you became. But Daud was the beginning. He killed your Empress, your love, and when he did he dragged you screaming from one world and into the next._ The corners of the Outsider’s mouth twitch. _Perhaps it would have been proper to thank him._

“Killing him wasn’t thanks enough?” Corvo murmurs. But he's working over the question—as surely the Outsider knew he’d be unable to keep from doing. If it's at all true, if it's fair from any perspective to think of Daud that way, of a direct lineage of events from Daud’s bloodstained sword to the man looking up at the Outsider with an easy, almost lazy smile…

The uncomfortable truth is that given the impossible chance to go back and stop it from ever happening, he still might. Never become what he is. Never become a man who smiles at the Outsider this way. Never become a man who did what he did last night, and who might do what he intends to do three or four nights from now when his need can no longer be contained. If he could keep himself from becoming the kind of monster Daud could never have dreamed of being.

He's not yet so far gone that the most pathetically withered part of him doesn't reach weakly—without faith, without hope—for the ghost of light.

It's troubling. What's left to do, to kill that part? To scour his heart of it?

_He did seem to welcome it, didn't he? Despite what he said at the end._

Corvo runs his hand through his hair—tousled, though he wasn't sleeping. He sleeps considerably less than he used to. “Is this a social call? Or did you come here to take a stroll down memory lane?”

 _I need a justification for being here? My reasons are my own._

The Outsider is always cold—except in the searing moments of orgasm—but this coldness in his tone and affect is of a different type, and to someone holding on at even the halfway mark of normal, it would probably be disquieting.

But Corvo is who he is. Which could not, at this point, be any further from anything anyone would call _normal_.

Not every one of their encounters concludes with them hurling their bodies at each other in the kind of war both of them seem to savor fighting. But it works out that way frequently enough that by now he's come perilously close—and a different part of him does understand that it's perilous—to expecting it. To wanting it, certainly, and indeed it's been an unusually long dry spell, and of a series of unsurprising things, another is the heat pooling between his legs, collecting and flowing back into his veins to thrum beneath his skin. He's naked—possibly he was hoping for this, possibly on some level he even knew he might get another chance tonight—and he swivels his hips, edging the sheets further down, and leans back on one hand as he slides the other across the plane of his stomach.

His Marked hand. The Outsider likes when it's overtly visible. When it's particularly active.

But the Outsider folds his arms across his chest, narrows his eyes. Not the slightest sign of interest discernible. _What exactly do you think you're doing?_

And it's true that he's never really done this. Never gone out of his way to be inviting, even seductive; he's more than capable of his own kind of brashness, especially now, but this is new. Practically displaying himself, although as yet the sheet is still mostly covering his lower body. Presenting himself like an artfully arranged banquet table.

 _Come on. You know you want it._

_You know you want me._

“You've been distant lately.” His smile doesn't so much widen as deepen its curve, and his hand eases beneath the sheet and passes over the already diamond-hard length of his cock, and he lets out a sound between a sigh and a moan. “Did I disappoint you somehow?”

He doesn't sound genuinely concerned. Because he's not. Concern of that kind appears to be antithetical to what he's become.

The Outsider’s eyes narrow further, slivers of obsidian standing out sharp in the pale angles of his face. _Stop that_.

Corvo curls his fingers loosely around the base of his shaft and sighs again. “Stop what?”

 _I told you once. I warned you. The fact that I choose to indulge these… urges in both of us is not permission to presume upon my good nature._

Corvo doesn't stop. Doesn't admit even the possibility of stopping. Alarm bells are beginning to jangle very faintly in the back of his mind— _you fool, this is a_ god, _he's already demonstrated how dangerous he can be_ —but they don't reach the rest of him. He's in control. He's been soaring above the world like a raven on an updraft, running unseen through the secret passages of the city like the cleverest of rats, indulging his own gruesome _urges_ with absolute impunity. Without the slightest consequence. Nothing has touched him. Surely nothing can.

He strokes himself slowly, lazy as his smile, and when he finally toes the sheet down to the middle of his thighs and reveals what the Outsider apparently considers one of his most appealing features, it takes him only a fraction of a second to grasp the mistake he's made. The line he's stepped over.

By then, of course, it's too late.

He doesn't see it. He _feels_ it, and the sheer intensity of the sensation is blinding: that aura of darkness that surrounds the Outsider whenever he appears expands in a blast like the explosion of a grenade, like the throes of reality that accompany the Outsider’s climax but so much more, so horribly much more; once again and even more the darkness seems to solidify, as if suddenly he's tumbling through the air and a black ocean is rushing up to meet him, and then the blackness is all he can see as he's engulfed and enclosed by agonizing, nerve-flaying _cold_.

He is tumbling. The bed has vanished from beneath him and gravity is shattering in the force of the chaos he's unleashed, and he scrabbles at nothing with numb fingers, panic unraveling his core. He tasted a hint of this when he first entered the Void, glimpsed the whole, but only now does he realize how little of it actually touched him. Possibly it was restrained. Possibly he was protected. Possibly he was being shielded, so he wasn't simply driven insane.

Nothing is shielding him now. He's helpless in the grip of it, and he screams as every part of him is yanked in every direction at once, his muscles strained to the point of ripping and his tendons pulled to the final limit of the tension they can absorb.

 _He's going to tear me apart,_ he thinks. Somehow there's no fear in that thought. It drifts above everything else, a fine thread of analysis in the midst of the madness battering the walls of his skull. _He's going to tear me apart and my pieces are going to float in the Void for the rest of eternity and my punishment for everything I've done will be to never die and never be whole_.

He's not in pieces.

It's worse.

Gravity slams back into him along with the rest of the world and he's being flipped onto his stomach, something bearing down on the back of his head and shoving his face into what he dimly recognizes as the mattress. Bands of solid cold curl around his knees and ankles and he screams again as they wrench his legs even further apart and lock him spread-eagle, his hamstrings wailing in protest—and with terror like a nightmare dawn, he's beginning to understand what's happening to him.

What's about to happen.

 _No,_ he might be crying, muffled by a fold of the covers, _no no no please no please don't I'm sorry_ and then the bands of cold are hands, such well-known hands working roughly over him, nails raking viciously up his spine and gouging into his shoulderblades, a breath of a laugh as needle teeth close over the shell of his ear.

_You were warned, sweet Corvo. Oh, you were warned, and of course you didn't listen. I don't know that I expected anything else. You do surprise me so often, but not every time._

_My lovely black bird. Apparently I need to clip your wings._

He wrestles in air to launch another round of pleading but before he can fill his lungs even halfway, something like an icicle is nosing into the crack of his ass, pushing slowly but ruthlessly into him, and he wonders if he’ll ever be able to breathe again.

It's not big. It doesn't feel much thicker than a single finger. And it's _slick,_ and it slides into him with an ease that shocks him almost as much as the cold. He expected it to hurt, and it does—he desperately tries to relax around it because with a last shred of coherent instinct he intuits that resisting will only make it worse—but there's something else beneath the waves of pain, like a current of volcanic heat thousands of feet down in an ocean trench. He plunges toward it, groping for it, and then the thing inside him is thickening and stretching him, the heat subsumed in fresh pain, and his hopeless sob is like lead shot colliding with his breastbone.

No longer only hands. He can't see anything but the darkness, can barely feel anything but the endless cold, but that's a body on top of his now, pinning him down with itself—strength that he knows far transcends the frame that contains it. A body moving over him and harsh panting in his ear as the thing in him thrusts deep, withdraws, thrusts again, faster. The Outsider fucking him. The _Void_ fucking him, and he can't make it stop.

All at once the heat is returning, and the current is swelling to a flood.

He's not supposed to be enjoying this. The part of him that retains enough sanity to know anything knows that perfectly well. This is supposed to hurt him, it's supposed to be painful—and it is, it's _excruciating,_ but it's rapidly becoming more than that. He was attempting, with the last pathetic scraps of his power, to struggle; now he finds himself arching under it, pressing against the body over his and moaning as the remaining fight bleeds out of him…

And he opens, and every thrust touches something in him that flares pleasure in his head like a distant firework.

 _You. Don't. Control. This._ The Outsider snarls in his ear with every cruel snap of his hips. _You don't. Control._ Anything. _Know that._ Know _that._ The tension in his voice coiling and coiling like a spring winding to the point of breakage, his rhythm both furious and uneven. _I Marked you. I_ own _you. You're_ MINE.

Corvo releases another broken moan and his mouth is moving against the bed, and it's silent but he knows he'll be heard. _Yes_. _Yes_.

 _Yours_.

The Outsider is grinding him into the mattress with every slam of their bodies, and that friction is dragging him further; it's not enough but he's moving his own hips now, trying to find what he needs—clumsily humping the bed like a wolfhound in rut, and he's not sure he's ever been this hard. It still hurts so much, but the line between the pain and the pleasure the Outsider is fucking into him has utterly melted away along with the cold, and now it's all scorching heat, and he was crying _no_ and trying to beg for it to stop…

And he doesn't want it to.

By the Void, he doesn't want it to ever stop.

 _Mine,_ the Outsider is repeating—strained. Mindless. Corvo has never heard him sound like this. He never imagined it could be possible. Like the Outsider isn't in control either. Like no one is. _Mine. Mine. Mine—fuck,_ Corvo—

The Void empties itself into him with one final black explosion, the ragged shout of the Outsider’s completion ringing in his ears like a massive bell, and he crumbles into it, wracked with spasms and clutching frantically at the sheet as he comes and comes.

Falling into the darkness.

Gone.

~

Light.

It's not. It's not bright. He remembers enough to be sure of that—the room was dark when the Outsider came to him and it's still the dead of night, the hours furthest from either sun. But after that infinity of darkness, even the faintest light is a whole new kind of blinding, and Corvo groans and cringes away from it, shielding his eyes with shaking hands and turning his face into the mattress.

He's empty. He would weep over that emptiness if he wasn't so dry.

_What was that._

No questioning inflection. It's not a question at all. It's a flat whisper only, and when Corvo manages to open one eye and squint into the dimness, he can just perceive the barest outlines of the Outsider’s face in the sullen glow of the coals in the grate.

That face is stunned.

Corvo can't begin to comprehend any of it.

The Outsider is stunned, and naked—something else Corvo now realizes he didn't know was possible. That the Outsider has a corporeal form when he wants to, that he has a cock when he wants to, yes, that's a notion he can grasp, but somehow that the Outsider would be like _this,_ that he would choose to appear to him this way… Not as vulnerable as someone human might look stripped of clothing, not really vulnerable at all, but so strange and so strangely beautiful, those long, delicate limbs and all that pale skin bare and luminous. His black eyes staring blankly into the ruins of the fire.

Corvo doesn't move. He's curled on his side, loose and trembling and there's no part of him that doesn't hurt. But he thinks vaguely back to other times when he's been violated—not as he's been tonight, never that, but in Coldridge, defenseless against the other atrocities inflicted on him—and there's almost no comparison.

 _Right_ isn't the word he wants. Right, that it's this way. But it's the closest one he can find. 

_I've never done that before,_ the Outsider murmurs. Half turns his head, and Corvo draws a shallow breath as those terrible eyes touch him. Yet still he doesn't look away. _I’ve never even wanted to. In four thousand years, not once._

He pauses. His silent scrutiny is like being skinned alive.

_What are you doing to me?_

Corvo pulls in another shuddering breath—and incredibly, feels himself smiling. “Don’t we all choose to be what we are?”

The Outsider’s smile is thin and full of malevolent amusement. _Perhaps I should punish you again._

Corvo says nothing. For a long time, neither does the Outsider. His awful gaze returns to the coals. Maybe, Corvo considers, he's looked like this as he's witnessed the deaths of stars.

Then: _I did come here for a reason._ He absently waves a hand. _Not for that. But something else. There's a conversation we may need to have._

Corvo remains silent. Waiting. The vast emptiness inside him is like an echo—a single voice in the dark, small and quavering and lost.

 _I've been so gentle with you, Corvo, and you don't even know it._ The Outsider’s smile lingers, its malevolence not reduced in the slightest. _I've been so patient. I've eased you into it, truth after truth. And it's been such a thing to watch, those revelations washing over you. There's never been any Marked like you. Normally—_ He breathes a laugh. _Normally when people choose the way you did—the violence, the hatred—it's ultimately boring to me, because it’s predictable. It's far more interesting when they go another way. But then there's you._

Without turning, he reaches out and skims his fingers up Corvo’s thigh to his hip. It's an idle caress. Almost affectionate. Corvo bites back a whimper.

 _You've gone so much further than any of the others ever have. Looking into your darkness… It’s amazing. It’s as if there's a shard of the Void inside you—and I didn't put it there. I'm not sure what did. I can't look away._

“So you just wanted to flatter me?”

The Outsider’s fingers hook and again nails dig into his skin and sparkle pain through his nerves, and he winces. _Behave yourself._ Pause. _You've gone so far. But you're poised to go even further, if you'll just allow yourself to fully see certain truths. You insist on concealing them. It's vexing me. I'm beginning to wonder if you need another little nudge_.

Something stirs in the chest at the foot of the bed. Weak, but still alive. Somehow.

Finally the Outsider turns and lifts himself, crawls over Corvo’s quivering body, leans down and grazes his lips over his cheekbone.

 _She's almost seventeen, old friend._

Another long moment of nothing. The chill of the body pressed against his. And all Corvo wants to do is roll over and spread himself and welcome that cold back inside.

But it's gone. Not only shifting away: disintegrating, fading, merging with the dregs of the night. A final airless whisper in his ear.

_No matter. I can be patient a while longer, and I'd rather watch events unfold in their own time. In any case, I suspect soon they will. You can only hide it from yourself for so long. You want what you want. Whether you choose to allow yourself to take it…_

_Ah, that might be a very different thing._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You don't know how long and hard I wrestled with myself over whether to add the tag "Void as lube".
> 
> ETA: aw screw it I did


	14. it can be sweet though incomplete though

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo and the Outsider deepen their brutal affair. The Dunwall Butcher stalks the streets. And Dunwall itself is waiting... for what?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relatively shortish chapter, setting up a whole new phase in this. I'm excited to get to it. ❤️

Whatever the nature of the cause, things change.

He doesn't give the Outsider reason to punish him again after that. He behaves himself. He knows his place. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Not the way it did, not quite so much pain, not quite so much sadism, not quite so much _rage_ —but when something strains to a breaking point, as when he goes out to hunt, he finds himself stretched out on his bed and smothering his cries with the pillow as the Outsider wrenches him open and fills him over and over and _takes_.

And sits afterward in silence, gazing into the dying fire and brooding as Corvo lies exhausted and shaking with pain and the aftershocks of ecstasy, adoring him with his eyes.

He believes that he's no longer capable of love in the way most people would define it, although what he feels for Emily is worshipful and abject and all-consuming. But if he could feel that kind of love, if what remains of his heart could ever sustain it, he might be falling into it now.

_Don't leave me empty. Come back and fill me again._

The Outsider continues to largely keep his own counsel where this is concerned. He's waiting for something.

The city is quiet. Gristol is quiet. The Empire, in general, is quiet. The Dunwall Butcher naturally continues to be a topic of fearful conversation, but as Corvo is discovering—with minor irritation, in all honesty—given enough time and consistency even something like a masked killer lurking in the night can become almost mundane. People can only maintain the keen edge of their terror for so long before it begins to go blunt. And people can grow accustomed to anything.

So yes, this coupled with the relative calm might profoundly annoy him. He misses the days of the gang wars. He misses the fires and the fear and the indiscriminate violence. But it's that sense of waiting that placates him, that allows him to find equilibrium. Now and then he adjusts his hunting patterns just to keep things interesting—he experiments with different methods, scenarios, how he selects his prey. Gang members, now and then. Petty criminals. Occasionally members of the upper crust who get under his skin. There's a brief period where the first rumblings of what might become more problematic dissent come to his attention—not among the Watch this time but once with a group of slaughterhouse workers and another time a small collection of clerks and barristers who, for one suicidal reason or another, have revived among themselves a sense of loyalty to Burrows.

_Burrows,_ of all people.

For the most part, the executions of the Watch conspiracy members appeared to have taught Dunwall a lesson. But he takes the opportunity to remind everyone. A few of them he has picked up, and for Emily’s entertainment he arranges another fair day in Holger Square. The others, he takes care of privately. In terms of the murders themselves, he leaves no overt sign regarding what they all have in common. He trusts people to be able to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions.

There are a few weeks where he uses only the rats—which has the interesting side effect of preventing any identification of the murders with the Butcher at all. Instead people put it down to the rats themselves and worry about the return of the plague.

Then there's another period where he focuses solely on incendiary bolts. Which he likes on their own merits, but there's an element of distance, standing back and watching his victims writhe and shriek, that he doesn't enjoy as much as when he works more closely. The fires, also, people don't identify with the Butcher. The Bottle Street Gang is suspected by some, and others blame a series of freak accidents.

In any case, he usually goes back to the sword in the end. Why argue with what works best? Then he's the Butcher again, and it’s almost as if everything reverts to the way it should be.

He looks for other sources of novel amusement. For a change of pace and in the interest of seeking a greater challenge, he spends some time thinning out the Overseers a bit. Not many of them, because he senses that this might be a whole other edge to tip over that he isn't quite prepared for yet. But there's a deliciousness in taking them down, in how he goes out of his way to make it plain to them who's slaughtering them and with what power. He relishes their horror and revulsion. He jeers at their self-righteous proclamations as they try and fail to kill him. On the night of the Fugue Feast—one of the best nights, it keeps him satiated for nearly two weeks—he knocks out three of them with sleep darts and takes them to the ruins of Brigmore Manor, strings them up and plays with them for hours and then, when they're all but finished, he and the Outsider put on a show for them, laughing at their moans of agony and horror, all hard kisses and rutting against each other in the blazing firelight.

_What?_ he asks, lounging in front of them and sucking the Outsider’s come off his fingers—sharp and sea-salty and still hot. _Why so shocked? I thought you knew we did this kind of thing, we witches. You go on and on about it in all your sermons._

They're dead before dawn. Holger Square awakens to find what's left of them dangling from a lamppost.

But overall, it's not like it was. It's almost never as satisfying as it used to be. It's pleasurable enough, it fills the minimum of his needs, but there's something missing. A crucial element. A spark.

He's waiting. The Outsider is waiting. The entire city is waiting, hushed and tense beneath the veneer of what now passes for normality.

And then one day Emily Kaldwin, the First of Her Name, turns seventeen.

 


	15. I hope they cannot see the limitless potential

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the grand occasion of the seventeenth birthday of Her Imperial Majesty Emily Kaldwin, it is our pleasure to extend this cordial invitation to a masked ball in her honor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hooray, the surviving Boyles. I've been looking forward to reintroducing them. They're going to be, uh, important. 
> 
> (I might start updating this a trifle quicker, because I finished most of chapter twenty-fucking-five today and it's getting a little ridiculous how far ahead I am)
> 
> Thanks as always for reading. ❤️

She's doing so very well.

Her days of sullenness and pique and uncontrolled anger are long since passed. She heard what he told her on the morning when he knocked her to the ground and held her there, and now her rage is keenly honed, an invisible companion to her sword, every bit as potentially dangerous and lethal as the weapon itself.

She is a weapon. She knows it now.

It's a joy, practicing with her. It's everything he wanted it to be. They used to clash when they dueled, laboring under a severe imbalance of not only skill but every meaningful aspect of attitude. But she's catching up to him more rapidly every day. Every one of those days it's smoother, more graceful, more elegant; it's fencing but it's also _dancing,_ that perfectly choreographed dance he's usually only able to fully experience by himself against an imaginary opponent. She's not quite there yet but he can see so clearly how she might reach it, how she will, and moving with her as the dawn bleeds into the sky, advancing and feinting and deflecting, dodging and turning his attacks aside, spinning around him with her hair and blade flashing and her lips curving into a fierce smile, his heart flies and sings with the kingsparrows. 

The first time she successfully disarms him, he pulls her into an embrace and showers her face with kisses. At first she's astonished, stiffening.

Then she smiles again and offers her face be kissed.

She was impatient, too. That's not over, he can tell she still is, but as with everything else in her now, it's carefully controlled. It went unspoken between them, but when she began to enjoy the practice for its own sake, she also came to understand in a way she hadn't before that she was being prepared. That when he finally allows her to make use of what he's teaching her, her extensive preparation will make it all the better. 

And it's the control of her impatience that tells him that she's ready.

She turns seventeen.

Every Empress’s birthday is an occasion of national importance, but this one, the penultimate one to her coming-of-age, turns out to be a particularly elaborate affair. The celebrations begin a full day prior, with a military parade across Kaldwin’s Bridge for the general public—which is fortunately conducted under only a light mist instead of heavy rain—and a ball in the Estate District for the nobility. The ball in question is hosted by the Boyles, with whom Corvo has spent the last five months or so slowly cultivating a relationship. They don't trust him and don't exactly like him either—essentially no one does, which is perfectly fine with him and even preferable—but he's given them the impression that they have a chance to get nearer to the throne than most. He’s arranged for Emily to show them special favor in Court. He's encouraged her to grant the family greater tacit support in Parliamentary matters. To Emily’s perplexed resistance, he's had one response.

 _Trust me._

She does. Since the contentious early days in the practice yard, almost without exception, she trusts him completely.

And then there's the more personal side, because two months ago when Esma Boyle asked him to take tea with her—alone—he accepted. He went and drank her tea and ate her sugary cakes and smiled at her terrible jokes and her blatant flirting and was perfectly charming—he's found that he's so much more effectively charming as a monster than he ever was as a man—and in short left her with the notion that he liked her.

That perhaps he might like to see her again.

Every time he's run into her since then, he's done what he can to subtly encourage that notion. He smiles. He bows gallantly low over her hand. Twice at parties he's danced with her. The Royal Protector is widely distrusted and even disliked by the population as a whole, yes, and certainly he was involved in some unsavory activities during the period of interregnum, but wasn't he also exonerated of the worst crime? Isn’t he also settling into an attractive middle age? Isn't he handsome and even dashing in his exotic Serkonan way? And stars, he was consort to one empress and he's the father of another. He has a title and two roles in the Imperial Cabinet. Arguably he's the second most powerful person in the entire Empire. He's as close as one gets to the throne without actually sitting on it. 

And he apparently likes her.

A more formal alliance between the Boyles and the Kaldwins, even through a man who isn't technically a Kaldwin, would carry with it certain advantages. And Esma Boyle’s somewhat problematic reputation is a matter of record, but she's not a complete fool. She can discern an opportunity to do some social climbing when it's placed right in front of her. 

Corvo hates both of the Boyles. But he loathes Esma. It’s why he chose her. It's the kind of loathing he treasures. He's saving it up, storing it with care, letting it age like fine wine. The evening when he finally opens the barrel will be special.

Not yet. Not quite yet.

So he and Emily attend their ball.

Once he hated masked balls. Aside from his usual discomfort with formal social occasions, they made him uneasy; he didn't like not being able to read faces, to have to peer through slits to perceive eyes. He was an expert on body language in and of itself, but a face betrays things a body doesn't, eyes even moreso, and during the few Jessamine attended, he stuck even closer to her side than usual and regarded everyone around them with such open suspicion that she would tease him.

 _Yes, it's an entire crowd full of murderers, foul assassins all. Corvo, even if they decided to come at me and somehow got past you, they're so drunk they'd miss._  

 _Forget them. Come and dance with me._

And he wouldn't forget. But he would dance with her.

Then came Waverly Boyle’s last party. Slipping easily past the guards—lazy and inattentive in any case, City Watch on what they believed was a choice assignment—and climbing the steps of the mansion, entering the polished extravagance of the grand hall as if he belonged there even more than any of them, signing the guest book with a flourish so uncharacteristic of him, and the looks his mask earned him, some apprehensive and unsettled but even more carelessly admiring. So droll, to come dressed as the murderer stalking the streets. They were such fools, stupid and complacent as oxen. He could have slaughtered every last one of them that night. There have been times since then when he's wondered why he didn't.

Perhaps that was another moment in those days when he should have sensed that something deeper inside him was very, very wrong. When she went with him into the cellar, trusted him when he whispered to her that her life was in danger and oh, he wasn't lying, when he pinned her against the wall and tore off her mask to see the terrified realization in her eyes before he cut her throat.

He didn't have to do that. He could have made it quick and clean. He could have snapped her neck. He could have shot her with a sleep dart and drowned her.

But he wanted her blood on his blade. On his hands. And he wanted to see her fear of him.

Was he aroused then? Was he hard? He doesn't know. Perhaps he didn't want to let himself know. There were illusions he was still hanging onto. 

Since then he hasn't hated masked balls at all. He does, in fact, enjoy them tremendously. He's no longer bothered by not being able to see faces, by having to peer to catch glimpses of eyes; he knows the rotten core those facades are almost always hiding, and he doesn't wonder about anyone’s intentions. The masks amuse him. And he doesn't worry about his ability to neutralize anyone who proves to be a problem. 

He's not wearing the mask this time. He hasn't since that night, not to a party. He's selected a mask fashioned after a raven, sharp beak and glossy, subtly iridescent feathers. No sequins, no gems or baubles; only that silky blackness, his clothes black as ever, and he's lined his eyes with kohl.

Emily is dressed in glittering red. Her mask, incongruously, is a kingsparrow, and it looks as if a bird has been immersed in blood and beheaded. 

He sees her before they arrive at the mansion, naturally he rides with her in her carriage, but at the entrance to the hall—the one he walked through seven years ago to carry out his mission—they pause, and he turns to her and all he can do is behold her, all the breath fled from his lungs. 

“Father,” she murmurs, and she offers her delicate, strong, crimson-gloved hand and settles it into his, and together they walk through the door.

_Her Imperial Majesty Emily Kaldwin, First of her Name, and Royal Protector and Spymaster Lord Corvo Attano!_

Applause. An explosion of white and gold confetti over their heads. The pianist and harpist on the dais in the corner strike up a somewhat unsteady rendition of the Imperial Anthem. And all eyes are on the pair of them, Void-black and blood-red, and he doesn't have to see those eyes to know that they're uneasy.

He's just straightening up from signing the guest book—of course, always—and dressed all in white silk stretched tight around her curves, her mask a blushing rose, Esma Boyle is taking his arm and _oh my dear Lord Corvo, how simply_ divine _to see you again, we’re so honored by your presence, clearly you'll have many responsibilities this evening but if you could spare a few minutes for a dance it would be my inexpressible delight—_

And he bows. Smiles. She can only see its edges beneath the half-beak of his mask, but he does.

If she could see that smile plainly in full light, she would run from him, screaming.

~ 

He does dance with her. For more than a few minutes, in fact, and that might be what finally makes Emily break.

~

He doesn't miss when she leaves. He can tell that she's trying to slip out unnoticed, her head down and her movements furtive—guarding her physical intentions from view is something they're going to have to work on. He doesn't catch her as she heads for the door out into the garden; he merely follows her, stepping smoothly out of sight when she glances back with her hand on the knob, walking in her footsteps a minute later. 

He finds her not far from the house at the center of a simple hedge maze lit by floating lanterns, seated on the rim of a small fountain. One of her gloves is off, and she's turned at the waist and trailing her fingers across the rippling water, staring into it. The marble interior is ringed with lights and the water is an unnatural blue.

He moves silently. But although she gives no indication when he stops in front of her, she must know he's here.

“Do you like her?”

He doesn't answer for a moment. He's puzzled. Does he like _who?_ He doesn't like anyone in there. Why would she think otherwise? Why would she even care? 

Then it hits him, and his sigh of exasperation is far more directed at himself than her. He was being inexcusably thoughtless, and now he's gone and hurt her. And while he's not averse to hurting her as a rule, he vastly prefers to mean it when he does. 

“I don't,” he says quietly. “I hate her. You know that.”

“Then why are you the way you are with her? Why are you smiling at her? Why are you _dancing_ with her?” She whips around and gazes up at him, her eyes shining in their wreaths of red feathers. “You keep telling me to give favor to her family. You accept her invitations. You chose her and her sister to host this ball. Corvo, if you hate her, you have a _strange_ way of showing it.”

 _Trust me,_ he said when she asked him _why_. And he could say it again. But in his head it sounds weak, pathetic, and it also sounds like something he would say to a child. Which, as he's told her over and over, she no longer is.

She's a woman. She's young, not yet of age, but she is one.

“Emily,” he murmurs, reaches down and gently lifts her mask away from her face. Removes his. Lays them side by side on the edge of the fountain as he lowers himself to sit beside her, and her bare hand is small and cool and wet in his. “I swear, I hate her.” 

“She says you're going to marry her.” She ducks her head, gaze fixed on the other hand curled in her lap. Her voice is flat and it trembles very, very slightly. “She was talking to Lydia about it. She sounded sure. Did you say anything to her? Did you promise her something?” 

“I…” And he trails off into a sharp laugh, incredulous and also scornful, of himself, only himself, because how did he not see. How did he not _see_. That she would trust him, certainly, but also that she would watch him and what he's doing and it would only make one kind of sense to her.

She's smart and quick, and she's vicious. But she's still lacking in guile, or at least she can't hope to match him yet.

 _You will. My love, you will._

He squeezes her hand. “Would you believe me if I told you it was a surprise?”

Her eyes widen. She stares at him—and yanks her hand free, nearly recoiling, her mouth open in a horrified little moue and her eyes shining even brighter. “You _are_ going to marry her.”

“No. _No_.” He takes her hand again, clasps his around it. “I'm not going to marry anyone, Emily. Not ever. I swear it.” He reaches up and cups her face, his thumb gliding across her cheekbone. “I won't ever try to replace your mother. I won't ever bring someone else into our Tower.”

She looks at him for a long time, not pulling away now, not flinching—her wide eyes desperately searching him, looking for any sign of evasion or deception. She's frightened, Void help him, without intending to he's _frightened_ her, and he despises himself for it. 

“I couldn't stand it,” she breathes at last. “I couldn't stand to see you with someone else. Her.” She shudders. “But anyone. Father, please.”

 _You think this is something._ A swirl of darkness in the trees. _It isn't what you think._

He sucks in a breath. He hears her voice, glimpses her all in white running ahead of him up to the pavilion, where everything changed forever. Where he now knows that the man he was died that day in Jessamine's arms, run through by Daud’s blade, and something else began to grow in his place.

_Corvo, if you won't marry my mother, will you marry me?_

He smiled fondly when she said that. She didn't understand yet, sweet little thing. She didn't understand marriage, and she didn't even quite understand what _father_ meant to her, the boundaries it set. She did understand that she loved him, and what did you do with any man you loved? You married them, of course.

But.

_Will you marry me?_

“I will never marry anyone else,” he says softly, and he raises her hand to his mouth and presses his lips to her palm, turns it, kisses her slick knuckles one by one. She watches him, and she marks each kiss with her dark, shining eyes.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can we just have a moment of appreciation for what _another fucking level of badass_ it is when you have Corvo sign the guestbook in that mission? 
> 
> I mean, there are moments and choices in the first game that I feel are particularly important in Corvo's characterization, but I think that one is especially powerful, especially given how easy it is to overlook.
> 
> Also: moment of appreciation for the idea of Corvo wearing black eyeliner.


	16. curling up slowly and finding a throat to choke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All of Dunwall celebrates the seventeenth birthday of their Empress. But Corvo has planned a celebration of a very different kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much to say other than it means so much to me that you're reading this, so thank you. ❤️

Her birthday.

What happens that day isn't important. Oh, there are the usual festivities, another banquet and a grand reception and dignitaries from all across the Isles come to offer their gifts and best wishes. Speeches are made, toasts to the glory of the Empire and the Kaldwin name, and the current Kaldwin in particular (long may she reign), and Emily suffers it all with her usual polite disinterest thinly veiling her bored distaste. She continues to dislike it when they touch her hands.

But none of that matters.

What's important is what happens when the day is over.

That night there are fireworks over the Wrenhaven, launched from three grand naval ships. She creeps away from the main crowd on the terrace and climbs to one of the highest parapets and stands there, the wind whipping at her hair, and watches them. There's a chill riding on that wind. The air smells like rain.

He touches her shoulder and she turns, not startled as far as he can see, and she gazes at what he's presenting to her, his head slightly bowed.

It's simple, unadorned, and it doesn't fold in half. But its lines are clean and elegant, the weight perfectly balanced for her frame, and it's every bit as sharp as his. She curls her fingers around the grip and lifts it, turns it and watches the explosions lighting up the sky sparkle over the flat of the blade. She slashes it experimentally. Wheels, finds her stance, and advances with easy precision.

He watches her, his arms folded across his chest. He's changed out of his more formal dress and into the plainer clothing he wears for these times. His coat and cowl.

His hunting garb.

“Go to your room,” he says quietly when she lowers the blade and turns to face him. “There are clothes laid out on the bed. Put them on and come back to me.” He nods at her sword. “Bring that.”

She gazes silently up at him. The fireworks illuminate her face in pulses and swells like glowflies on a hot Serkonan night. Except that luminescence…

He’d swear some of it is coming from _inside_ her. As if her entire body is one single Mark.

“Quickly, now.” He claps her upper arm. “Go.”

She hesitates a second or two longer. Then all at once she's pushing up on her toes and framing his face, and for a heart-stopping instant she's pressing her lips against his.

It's not that they've never shared this kind of kiss. They have, many times by now. Light and fleeting, always chaste, always perfectly respectable, nothing that anyone by any stretch could call untoward. And this time isn't really any different—except that she's lingering just the slightest bit longer than she has before, pressing just a little bit more firmly than she tends to do, and her lips are so soft and warm and his hands are settling against her sides and he's battling back a shiver.

And then she's gone, darting into the shadows of the doorway, leaving him behind and staring after her. Bereft.

He's expecting the Void to bloom beside him and disgorge contemptuous, laughing black eyes. He's expecting to be mocked. But the parapet is empty, and silence covers everything except for the wind and the distant pops of the fireworks and the jangle of music in the courtyard below. He's alone, and nothing appears.

Except her. She does, dressed all in the color of old blood, her sword in its scabbard at her side. She's carrying the red kerchief he put out for her in one hand, an eyebrow raised quizzically, and both brows rise in sudden comprehension as he reaches into the breast of his coat—

And produces the mask.

“Of course,” she breathes, and ties the kerchief around the lower half of her face.

He looks at her for a moment longer, fixing the image in his mind like a silvergraph. Then he seizes her around the waist and leaps up to the parapet’s wall, and she doesn't have time to cry out in surprise before he's hurling them both into the air—

And out of existence.

~

They fly across the rooftops, and he thinks it might be the closest thing to a heaven beyond nonexistence that he'll ever attain.

He has it all planned. Not so rigidly that it can't accommodate variation or last-minute changes, but he knows what he wants to do. The Boyles are safe for the present; he had briefly considered it, making them her first time—her first _real_ time, the first in her current form—but some instinct whispered to him that it wasn't quite right, not yet. The Boyles will be very, very special.

And there's also the problem of Emily herself.

The Watch officer was an assassin. The people she had executed—and all those since then—were traitors. She knows that he's killed, knows he's killed hundreds, and she's more than accepted it; she's _embraced_ it and appears to enjoy the notion. But as far as her knowledge goes, he's only killed people he can justify killing with some reason other than _because_ _I_ _wanted_ _to_.

Even if the reason is flimsy at best.

She's on her descent into the infernal Void in which he's now at home. But she has some distance to go yet before she attains his level of corruption, and there are parts of it which he suspects he'll have to ease her into.

They pause on one of the rooftops below the Tower and she stumbles back when he releases her, staring wide-eyed at his death-masked face and the Mark still glowing very faintly on his hand, and back to his face again. Her breath is coming in rapid gasps, stirring the kerchief.

She knows some of what he can do. But he's never told her the full story behind how it was given to him, and he's never demonstrated it to her in quite this dramatically intimate a way.

He waits in silence, and after a moment she lets out a breathless laugh. “You could've warned me.”

“Where's the fun in that?” And it was fun. It's always been fun, or it has since the first morning in the practice yard, to knock her off-balance and watch her try to recover. The amusement when she can't. The pride when she does. But he lays a friendly hand on her shoulder, squeezes. “I won't do it again.”

She regards him skeptically, and although he really does mean it, it's reassuring to see that she does not, in fact, always trust him. That although her love for him is undiminished, she's learned from all the times he's taught her that in minor instances, he's not entirely trustworthy.

He nods at the rooftop, the ridge and incline laid out before them. The cascading rooftops beyond. “We’re going to run now. I want to see how you do.”

Her gaze is still skeptical—and the slightest bit uneasy as she glances at the drop to one side. They're extremely high, six or seven floors up, the winding street far below. What a fall would do to her is undebatable. “What if I trip?”

He grins behind the mask, and although she won't see it, there's no question that she'll hear it in his voice.

“Don't trip.”

~

If she were to trip, of course she'd be safe. He's learned through extensive experimentation—not always with willing subjects when he's feeling especially playful, and several of them ended badly before he got the hang of it—that with the aid of Bend Time, he can easily leap to catch her and Blink them both away before she falls too far. But he doesn't tell her this, and he takes pleasure in the idea that she might not be completely confident as together they sprint along high above the Dunwall streets, dodging and swinging around chimneys, vaulting over vents, leaping across gaps he deems manageable.

He takes pleasure in the fact that even if part of her is uneasy, she isn't allowing it to stop her. She isn't even allowing it to slow her down.

He already guessed that she'd be fairly good at this her first night out, and she's proving him right. He's watched her jump and clamber over the walls of the Tower, driving her governesses to hand-wringing distraction, and she's always been a good runner. Now and then she slides into a spot of clumsiness or nearly does trip and he can see plenty of room for improvement, and naturally there's no possible way she could hope to match his speed if he genuinely unleashed it, but as a baseline it's excellent, and once more pride swells hot and sweetly aching in his chest.

And she likes it. It's clear enough in how she's throwing herself into it that, as in the yard, she's enjoying the use of her own body, exploring its capabilities and limits, discovering skills she wasn't totally aware she possessed. He switches between leading and following her and watches her closely, and thinks of the brilliant red kingsparrow at the ball and the deeper, blacker red of her now, and how equally perfect both hues were. Her different faces. Her different masks. All of which he has the privilege of seeing.

He doesn't tell her where they're going. But he's sure she's noticed that he's gently herding her in the direction of the Distillery District, where the gang problem has been improved but never been brought fully under control. It isn't one of his favored hunting grounds but he's been here often enough, more frequently during the most intense period of Hatters and Bottle Street going for each other's throats, and he knows it well. Knows where the lairs are, the hideouts, even the ones that shift from location to location. It's not quiet here even this late; if anything the district’s inhabitants are taking advantage of the holiday to behave even more raucously before. Passing overhead they see bloody fights in alleys over trivial games of Nancy and casual insults, drunken revelers vomiting on the doorsteps of taverns, men and women and various combinations of the two sneaking into courtyards and behind dumpsters for a hurried, clumsy fuck—and not every one of those features participants who are completely willing.

He has no interest in protecting her from any of this, although a few times he catches a flash of shock in her eyes. Especially at that last. He notes it coolly, although he says nothing to her then. He told her years ago. It's a brutal world. It's cruel.

She'll be brutal and cruel to fit into it.

But there's one place in particular. He's been careful to verify beforehand—this place, this time. An upper room in an inn, the window open, the hulking shadow of a man moving inside.

He brings her up short on a balcony across the street. The eyepiece of the mask clicks as it rotates and magnifies. She must hear it; she turns to him and touches his arm.

“What is it?”

He points to the window. “In there, a deal will shortly be concluded for the transportation of fourteen girls from villages near Potterstead and Poolwick. They're taking them to the Golden Cat.” He glances at Emily. The eyepiece clicks again. Her face is a pale half-moon. “The girls didn't choose to go. Some of them are as young as twelve.”

Emily pulls in a hard breath and says nothing. Corvo waits; he can feel her processing, the well-oiled wheels in her mind turning as she works this over.

Twelve. And she was ten. She wasn't there for _that,_ no… but she was there. She saw things. As a rule, in all cases, Emily saw so much more than most people ever knew.

“If we kill him,” she says slowly. “The man in there. Will it stop it from happening? Will it be enough?”

He looks at her for a long time. At last he shakes his head.

“It'll slow it down. It won't stop it.” He reaches out and lifts a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “It'll never be enough.”

He won't lie to her. Not about this. Not, if he can help it, about anything. There are things he’ll keep from her. There are truths he’ll twist. But he won't lie.

Emily closes her eyes for a moment, her head bowed. Her hand is curled around the grip of her sword, as if she's ready to draw it.

She is.

“Take me in,” she murmurs, and her eyes open and they're cold, cold as the Void, and he knows he did this right. He did it exactly as he should. “I want him.”

~

He takes her in.

A single Blink across the street to the windowsill and she slides easily through, him following, and Slackjaw whips around with his hand on the butt of his pistol and his expression more annoyed than frightened—and, lit by the single oil lamp on the table, there's something magical about how his features transmute into fear when his gaze lands on Corvo’s mask.

It's funny—and somehow appropriate—that he doesn't realize who he should truly be afraid of now.

Slackjaw remembers him. Slackjaw has even owed him a debt, although he technically paid it long ago, and no doubt he considered himself safe after that. In fact, Corvo has made sure to keep him around; a pet of this kind can be useful. But not useful enough to be kept around forever, and Slackjaw is taking a step back, trying to fight down the fear, clearing his throat and making a pathetic attempt at being casual.

“Been a while, me ol’ pal. To what do I owe this… unexpected pleasure?”

Corvo doesn't answer. He stands by the window where he vaulted through; his sword is in his hand, but he makes no move to use it. As he hoped, Emily isn't waiting for his permission; as Slackjaw finally switches his focus to her, a mixture of confusion and surprise sweeping over him as if he's only noticing her just now, she draws her sword and lunges forward.

Fast. Not so fast that Slackjaw doesn't manage to get his pistol in his hand—and Corvo knows it wasn't a mistake on her part, that she doesn't want it to be over too quick and not without some challenge, and his smile feels as if it might split his masked face in half.

Slackjaw brings up the gun. Doesn't get a shot off; Emily’s sword cuts through the air and the gun clatters to the floor, taking his hand with it. He squeals, an embarrassingly shrill sound, and staggers, staring dumbfounded at the blood pumping in thick gouts from his wrist as his remaining hand fumbles for his knife.

Emily allows him to get one attack in, which she dodges it with lovely ease, before she leaps and kicks him to the ground and drops one knee onto his back, seizes him by the hair and yanks his head up—and how many times has he done that to her, that precise thing—and when she slits Slackjaw’s throat the movement is so quick and so clean that one might have missed it if they weren't watching closely.

Except that she slices so deep that she nearly takes his head off.

The head in question hits the floor with a dull thump when she releases it. But she doesn't rise; she stays there, half kneeling on the man’s spine and breathing hard, her head tilted back and her eyes heavy-lidded.

Corvo very much doubts that her breathing is only due to exertion. She's capable of far more without so much as breaking a sweat.

Nothing else for a time—which stretches out, unfurls, and might be counted at any length. And in truth he thinks he could dwell inside it forever, simply looking at her this way, fresh and hot and buzzing from what she's just done.

But then she gets to her feet, turns to him. The blood is an even deeper red on her gloves. He can't see whether she’s smiling—but her eyes are dancing, sparkling like stars on Tyvian snow. That glow again. The one he'd swear was coming from within her, pressing against the inside of her skin.

Through the door he hears the heavy tread of boots coming up the stairs; his vision goes Dark and he perceives their glowing outlines. He steps forward, catches her by the arm, tugs. Inclines his head toward the window. “We have to go.”

She exhales clear frustration. “We can take the others.”

He's about to deny her—his plan had been to start very small, if Slackjaw could be considered _small—_ but he hasn't done a thing yet, and he's begun to feel the need in him mounting over the course of the last couple of nights, and he did leave that plan flexible for a reason.

Boots approaching down the hall now. Drunken laughter. He flips his sword in his hand.

“You keep back,” he says softly. “They're mine.”

~

They're his. She’s a silent motionless spectator, melding with the shadows. He can feel her attention tracking his movements, his body, the fluidity of how he handles the blade. The blood spraying across the floor and wall. How he allows one to fight with him, clashing blades with him for a few taut seconds. How he spills the man’s guts onto the threadbare carpet when those seconds are up.

Four corpses in the end, sprawled across each other and drenched in blood, the pool spreading on the floor like four rivers have joined a single sea.

No shouts. No alarm. Any noise will have been taken as yet another brawl, of which tonight there will be many. He rests on his feet in the midst of the carnage, breathing, soaking in the ecstasy of murder, momentarily lost in the thunder of his heart and his own blood roaring through his veins.

Roaring to his cock.

It's a long, long time since the degree and species of his arousal at killing troubled him. What _does_ trouble him—albeit mildly—is that she's shortly going to be pressed against him when he takes her home, at least some of the time, and unless he gets control of himself there's only so much he can do to conceal what he's feeling and how he's feeling it.

He turns to her. Her expression is impassive now, although her eyes are still so bright. Her sword gleams in her hand. Near the window, cast in the hard beam of a streetlight, she looks like blood in the shape of a woman, poured into a crystal vessel fashioned in lean curves and graceful angles, and she's so beautiful and he loves her so _much_ that he would add his own blood to the pool on the floor if she demanded it, and his mouth is dry.

There's a bed in the corner.

_CORVO, SHE’S YOUR DAUGHTER_

Yes. She is.

He folds his sword, extends a hand. Without an instant’s hesitation she nestles her own into his.

He takes them both home.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so something I realized I'm doing here - and will be doing more in upcoming chapters, although in most of those cases I didn't consciously intend to do so - is giving little glimpses of what Corvo and Emily's relationship might have been if it wasn't so poisoned. 
> 
> Case in point: Giving her a sword as a gift, a kind of graduation from her initial training. I'm sure he did something like that in canon, or I love to think he did. So I feel like that scene is almost a dark mirror of the much sweeter, healthier event that very possibly took place in a different timeline. 
> 
> Sometimes this fic genuinely does make me kinda sad.


	17. how it could have been if you'd only lied

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their first hunting trip together ends in a delightful bloodbath, Corvo and Emily return to Dunwall Tower and say goodnight. But of course the evening isn't going to end there, and one person in particular might have something to say about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was so tempted to update this tonight and I got the smallest enabling nudge and that was all it took so here we are. Hooray. BUT I really am going to hold off for a few days after that, for various reasons. 
> 
> Even though the end of the chapter is setting up stuff I'm so excited to get to. 
> 
> [This is basically 100% Corvo right now.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=xIWT8enKI4I)
> 
> ❤️

She waits until they're back on the parapet—and he's removed his mask and she's untied her kerchief—to fling herself at him. 

He catches her, startled and simply focused on keeping his feet as she circles her arms around his neck and clings to him and kisses him—cheeks, chin, jaw, and, much briefer than before, his lips. She's laughing, not girlish giggles but deeper and richer, a tone of pure happiness that completely undoes him. So he can only hold onto her and be kissed, and smell the blood and subtle perfume in her hair.

The fireworks show has long since concluded. The Tower is quiet.

“Corvo,” she gasps, and lets out another rolling laugh. “Oh, father. It was _wonderful_.”

He's sure the idea that she was performing some kind of extralegal justice was satisfying to her. The anger in her had been real. But he doesn't believe that she's talking about justice when she says _wonderful_.

_It's for you,_ he thinks. She fits so perfectly into his arms. _Sweetheart, it’s all for you._

But of course it isn't.

~

He bids her goodnight outside her chambers. She kisses him again, turns back to him once before she closes her door, and she's radiant. He stays where he is after the door is closed and considers it.

Returns to his own chambers, undresses, and bathes.

_Where are you?_ he whispers silently. He's lit candles instead of the lamps and the illumination is wavering and dreamy, as if he's at the bottom of a shallow ocean and gazing up at the sun. _Why haven't you come to laugh at me? Haven't I given you enough fodder for it? Since when do you turn your nose up at this kind of entertainment? Since when do you leave me be?_

No response. The slow, steady drip of water from the tap. He's alone.

No, he isn't. He's never alone anymore.

He gets out of the tub, dries off, and starts toward the bed without bothering to retrieve nightclothes from the wardrobe. But halfway there he stops, head slightly cocked, the air raising goosebumps on his skin—and extends a tiny summons into the walls. Requests a sacrifice.

They won't deny him.

After a moment or two, a large brown rat emerges from a shadowy corner near the balcony and scurries toward him, and he pours himself into it.

He's done this many times. Crept through the Tower in this form, yes, spying and listening; it's well known that no one can effectively keep secrets from the Spymaster—at least not any that he would find either troublesome or useful—so almost everyone has ceased trying to do so. But he's also slipped into Emily’s chambers and watched her, hidden himself in a corner or on top of a chandelier or near the ceiling on a ledge of paneling and watched over her. Immersed himself in the soothing fact of her safety. He can't always be with her, but he can be close to it.

And there's also something pleasant in and of itself, watching her when she doesn't know she's being watched. When she's fully natural, unguarded and unselfconscious—reading, writing, brushing her hair, gazing out her window, or simply sleeping. That last he especially enjoys: when her features and body are fully relaxed and free from the concerns and worries that weigh more and more heavily on her with each passing day.

He might be hoping to see that now, her overtaken by a good kind of weariness and corresponding good dreams. Something to calm himself, ease the last of the tension from his muscles and help him into his own bed.

That's not what he sees.

He crouches on top of the bookshelf for a frozen moment, for the first time in a long time gripped by genuine shock. Initially he can't even make sense of what he's witnessing. Which is idiotic; he's not some bumblingly ignorant boy, the physical arrangements of girls still mysterious and exotic to him.

He knows exactly what this is. Didn't Jessamine do it for his enjoyment more than once?

But this is like another world breaking open, like the walls and floor and ceiling have cracked apart and pitched them both into the Void. And in fact the light falling through the window and across the floor and the bed is weird and directionless, not moonlight or starlight or lamplight but something entirely other, disorienting and surreal. The deep blue of her curtains and draperies, the more purplish hue of her bedspread—and all at once he's thinking of a shrine, its unreal luminescence and its whispers, only instead of etched bone laid out across it, it’s his _daughter,_ her long gazelle limbs, the light dyeing her naked skin the color of those bones, the curves of her neck and shoulders and waist and her bare breasts heaving as she drags in moaning gasps and her hand works between her spread thighs.

Every voice in his head should be bellowing for him to _leave._ To leave _now._ The words ringing in his inhuman ears— _for the sake of anything good left in you,_ go, _go, run as fast as you can back to your own rooms and bury your head beneath the pillow and forget you ever saw this._

And every one of those voices is silent.

He watches her, unblinking.

She's moving slow, taking her time with herself. But he’s also clearly arrived well into it: the density of her breathing, the roughness of her moans, the way she draws her legs up and slides two fingers between her labia, collecting the slickness there and returning them to her clit. His heart now is smaller and its thunder is more like the rattle of a drum as she raises her other hand to her breast and tweaks her nipple, arches her back and groans louder. She moves her fingers in tight little circles, baring her teeth at the ceiling, her eyes squeezed shut.

She's close. He doesn't need to know her rhythms to know that.

“Yes,” she's panting. “Oh, yes, yes… just like that, _please_ …” A strained whine and her spine bows, her legs shaking, everything shaking as her words bleed away into a sob and it rocks her, scoops her up and hurls her back down into waves of violent shuddering.

She doesn't stop all at once. It's gradual, how she loosens, how she withdraws her fingers and her hand falls to her side, limp and slightly folded—glistening up past her knuckles. Her lips curl, and something like a giddy laugh rises in the midst of her aftershocks. She strokes her wet fingertips up her belly, leaving gleaming trails across her skin.

She licks her lips. Her whisper hits him like a incendiary bolt to the brain.

_Corvo_.

~

“I can't.”

The Outsider leans back comfortably in the wingbacked chair by the fire. He's holding a tumbler of extremely fine whiskey, circling it between his fingers. _Can’t you?_

“ _No,_ ” Corvo hisses through gritted teeth, snapping his head up. He's sitting hunched at the foot of the bed—still naked and not caring, and his lack of caring isn't due to the usual and far more pleasant reasons. He glares at the Outsider, his hands clenched into tight fists. “It's too far. It's too much.”

_News to me,_ the Outsider says quietly, _that anything could be too much for you._

Corvo says nothing. He drops his head between his shoulders and digs his nails fiercely into his palms. He has no idea what would have happened if the Outsider hadn't been waiting for him when he returned to his room, and he doesn't care to think about it in too much detail.

What he would have done with himself. Been forced to do. Or suffer with it, which he does indeed deserve.

Take his cock in his hand and jerk himself off as lurid visions of burying it in his daughter's cunt hammer through his head.

_It's up to you, of course,_ the Outsider continues, setting the tumbler down on the side table. _It's always been your choice. What I want is for you to be honest with yourself about what_ you _want._ He leans forward, fingers steepled between his knees. _Forget all that nonsense about what you should or shouldn't do. You haven't given a shit about that for a while now and it's ridiculous to pick it back up again. So answer the question. What do you_ want?

Corvo doesn't answer. He's staring at the floor, at his bare feet, at his legs—her strong, slender legs spread so wide, so much wet softness waiting there, and he knows, he _knows,_ that it would be living paradise to kneel between them, kneel before his Empress, and bend his head and taste her.

This was in him the entire time. He knows that too; he felt it. But never with this degree of excruciating clarity. Never with this total and complete lack of ambiguity. He can't turn away. He can't pretend it's less than it is.

He wants to rip his brain out through his eyes.

_It would be one thing if she didn't desire you at all, if she'd recoil from you if you tried to touch her that way. But you know better. You want her,_ the Outsider whispers. _You want to_ fuck _her. Just say it. It's all right._

“It's _not_.”

_You are so_ exasperating, _Corvo._ The Outsider pushes suddenly to his feet and throws his gaze ceilingward as if for guidance. Normally this might be alarming, normally Corvo might wonder if some kind of punishment is approaching, but he can't detect any sign of that now. Only frustration of the kind he rarely sees in this entity. _You get so close to the apex of this, the apotheosis of what you've become, and suddenly for reasons that pass understanding you come over all_ _moralistic_ _. It's not only exasperating, it's_ stupid.

It is. It all is. So much about this is stupid, wretched, pathetic and shameful, and the worst part of it is that he honestly believed he was through with shame. That he was free of it. _Good. Evil._ At some point he began to consider, half-consciously, that he might be beyond those things. Or that the latter was giving him as much enjoyment for its own sake as the former ever had—blood and violence and hatred and pain and death, _chaos:_ all things to exult in, to shove in the faces of all the hypocrites who lie and lie and _lie_.

To rip off their fucking masks and rip their faces off along with them.

He thought he was done lying. He thought that he was above them all, in that he fully embraced his own nature. Lived more honestly than any of them in his way, and made his own pleasure the one good he cared for.

Now, with the curtain finally torn down, he thinks about his daughter and what he saw and what he can't unsee, what he can't _unknow,_ and he doesn't even know quite why it’s hitting him so hard, given everything else, but he cringes away from it in abject horror.

“You said,” he murmurs, looking up, “that you weren't a demonic little imp sitting on my shoulder.”

Another exasperated sigh. _I'm not. You know I'm not. And watch your tongue._ Liquid flutter of darkness and the Outsider is dropping to a crouch in front of him, peering at him. Even now, Corvo feels no urge to turn his face away from the endless black of those eyes. _You're your own demon, Corvo. You always have been._

He shakes his head. But it feels pitiful. “I won't do it.”

_Tell me why not._ A slap like a paddle of ice impacting his bicep and he winces. _And don't just tell me it's_ too much. _Don't you dare._

He's silent for a time. He's sitting beside the chest; he hadn't intended to do that, but now that he has, he's filled with the nearly overwhelming urge to pull it open and draw out the Heart, cradle it in his hands and caress the gears and glass, and beg her forgiveness. Beg her to help him. Beg her to tell him what he should do to put it right.

He knows without having to make the experiment that she won't speak to him. And that even if she would…

He can never put this right. He's gone too far. He went too far years ago. _Right_ no longer means anything to him. The Outsider couldn't have been more correct: it's absurd to care about that now.

_There's nothing good left in me. There's only something twisted and ruined that wishes it could remember what_ good _is._

“I won't do it,” he breathes. His hands are cupped together, as if they're holding the Heart after all. He pulls in a trembling breath. “I want to. I do. But I won't.”

_Well,_ the Outsider says after another moment, and lays a chilled hand at the base of Corvo’s throat. _We’ll see. Won't we?_

It's not punishment, what the Outsider does to him next. But it hurts.

~

Over a month later, after five nighttime excursions and three kills to her name, after watching her make each one with his heart seeking to immolate itself, he waits until she's out of her room, and he goes to her wardrobe and takes from it one of the things he hasn't been able to get out of his mind, and he goes to the Golden Cat.

 


	18. help me get away from myself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the Golden Cat, Corvo tries to satisfy a craving that feels as if it's growing beyond his control. It might or might not be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all knew we were gonna get get here eventually. :D
> 
> ❤️

He hasn't been here since he took care of the Pendletons, and they've never established for certain that he was directly involved in that. But naturally they all know him.

They're more than a little surprised to see him. He doesn't wonder at that. The constant celibacy of the Royal Protector is a well-known fact—or celibacy at least so far as anyone has been able to determine, because he's certain that some people suspect he might have taken a secret lover, and oh, if they only knew—and even if it wasn't, while this establishment routinely services the upper crust and nobility, that he of all people would seek to patronize it…

But the Madame—the replacement for the one he _removed_ —receives him politely, bids him welcome at the desk when he orders one of the guard they employ to summon her, and ushers him into a lounge off the main lobby where, she says, they can go into more private consultation regarding what his particular preferences might be.

He catches her eying the parcel under his arm.

They've redecorated since he was last here—reasonable, since that was nearly a decade ago—and instead of wine-colored silks and satins, they've redone everything in plush blue and purple, rich embroideries of gold brocade, and this color scheme surprises him not at all. The Outsider said that he was reborn into a nightmare, and all nightmares shape themselves according to their own consistent logic.

He appreciates the appropriateness of it.

Madame presses him onto a velvet couch and orders an elderly butler to bring them wine and a tray of fruit and a case of cigars. Apparently she intends to wait for those to arrive before they get down to the real business at hand, because at first she attempts to engage him in small talk that he finds both irritating and boring: the unusually clement weather for the Month of Wind, the rising prices of whale oil as rationing intensifies—which she takes care not to criticize—and how she believes it may have something to do with the increased availability of suitable girls from the smaller towns and farming villages, because in straitened means everyone must make a living, however come by. He nods at all of this but makes no move to participate beyond that, and he doesn't smile, and he senses that she's growing uneasy.

The parcel on the couch beside him seems to radiate a faint heat. He feels it against his arm, through his sleeve.

The wine and fruit and cigars arrive. He drinks the wine. Nibbles at the grapes. The cigars, he doesn't touch.

“Well, then.” Madame lights a cigar and leans forward over the arm of her chair and smoothes the coif of her gray hair and her trousers—these, at least, are still red, and she stands out bright against all the blue. “If it pleases you, my Lord, tell me how I can meet your needs on this fine evening. Anything,” she adds, waving fingers thickly gleaming with rings, “can probably be provided to you, and with ease. We pride ourselves on our ability to satisfy the most _diverse_ range of passions.”

He tells her. She listens intently, and she gives him no indication that she's connecting any dots. When he's done she calls for the butler again and gives him instructions.

And Corvo watches them, eyes narrowed. The Golden Cat trades in discretion but he's well aware of the scandal he's potentially exposing himself to. Or the blackmail to keep it from becoming a scandal in the first place. He’s fully prepared to respond appropriately should that be necessary.

This is another place where, seven years ago, he could have left no one alive. He could have easily made the Golden Cat a slaughterhouse.

It would be much, much easier now.

~

The girl affects an air of languid seductiveness, reclining on the enormous round bed. But he can tell, looking her over, that he's unsettling her.

He remembers this room. He didn't request it, but it amuses him that they've unknowingly given it to him. He slit Custis Pendleton’s throat in this room, hurled him to the floor and watched his blood soak into the carpet as the girl cowered in the corner and shrieked murder before he shut her up with a sleep dart to the neck. He was remembering, in that moment, summarily turning Custis out of a state dinner after what he dared to say to Jessamine. The cold, disgusted rage as he did it. A sudden spike of it, quickly suppressed, and how his hand itched for his sword.

Things have a way of coming back around in the end.

“Command me, my Lord,” she purrs, turning slightly so that her full breasts press against the confines of her bodice, and he wants to roll his eyes. Physically, she fits the description he gave. Perhaps a little curvier than he would ideally have preferred, but despite what Madame said about the Cat being able to _provide him with anything,_ the diversity of available body types has to stop somewhere. 

There were a couple who were a bit closer in some respects to the body he wants. But they looked very young. Far younger than seventeen. They may or may not have been, he didn't care to inquire, but in any case he moved on to the rest of the selection a bit hastily.

Damn it all to the Void, he does have his limits. Not because he has to, but because he chooses to.

 _Tell yourself that, Corvo, if you feel you must._

But physically, she's close enough. Her face, too—her high, angular cheekbones, full lips, straight nose, well-shaped brows. Black hair pinned back into a tight coil. Only her eyes aren't the same: instead of the dark brown he wanted, they're a brilliant green. Lovely, yes. _She's_ lovely.

But it's not quite right.

She's looking at him expectantly now, her arm draped against her waist and hip in a way carefully calculated to accentuate the line. A flicker of that disquiet behind her green eyes; this isn't what she anticipated, him standing in front of the closed door and practically glowering at her, all darkness in the lamplight. He came here because of the building pressure of frustration in his core, and he knows very well how easily frustration transforms into anger. And he doesn't want to be angry with her. He honestly doesn't. He feels no animosity toward her; he has no reason to. In another life he would have felt compassion for her, might even have wanted to help her if he could. She's trying to survive, like anyone else, and he knows without having to probe that her life is not a particularly pleasant one.

This act she's putting on for him is pathetic and laughable, transparent, but she's only doing it because it’s what her _clients_ have taught her that, by and large, they want.

He’ll just have to show her that he's not them.

“Sit up,” he says, his voice flat, and as she does, the act beginning to slip, he crosses the floor to her—and turns aside to the table by the window near the balcony, the one that faces the Wrenhaven, over which he vaulted seven years ago and entered the room as an agent of death. Night is falling and lights are glittering dully on the river, which looks like a stream of ink. There's more wine on the table, a decanter of red and two glasses, and he pours for them both.

She's looking a little less anxious when he profers one of the glasses. She accepts it, waits until he gives her tacit permission by draining a third of his own, and drinks. Offers him a faint smile, and it almost looks genuine.

The smile dies on her face as he tells her what he wants her to do.

~

But she does it. She does it because he's paid for her, and she does it because, in all likelihood, on its strict terms it's nowhere near the worst thing she's ever been told to do—and he would be very surprised if he's even the first man to come here in pursuit of this specific fantasy. In any case, aside from her initial shock she's readily amenable to it. Why shouldn't she be? He doesn't want to hurt her. He doesn't want her to do anything disgusting. He doesn't want anything elaborate. He doesn't even want very much of her time; he's paid for a full hour but he knows already that he won't be using anywhere near all of it.

When this is over, he doesn't anticipate lingering.

Yet he looks at her for a long while in the lamplight—the shade carefully designed to allow a warm, gentle glow inclined to minimize flaws and soothe the nerves—and doesn't move a solitary muscle. She stands by the bed, gazing at him with those piercing green eyes, and she clearly isn't comfortable in the suit and mask—the suit doesn't quite fit her, is too tight across the hips and chest—and also isn't sure about how she should be arranging herself, about what her posture should be. Her usual sensual poses won't work here, but those are the poses she's most familiar with. He could ask her to assume a more powerful stance, perhaps, shoulders and back straight, head high, feet planted—she could pull that off, because he'd be willing to lay down twice what he's paid for her that she's been required more than once to _discipline_ a client to their exacting specifications.

But that wouldn't work either. She won't be able to capture it. The casual pride, the absolute confidence devoid of unearned arrogance. The comfort in her own skin. The inborn knowledge that she can command everyone around her, himself included, to obey her every whim and expect those whims to be obeyed. The bearing of an Empress—this poor girl doesn't have that, could never have that, and it's no fault of hers but again he feels his frustration rising.

This isn't right.

But she's trying. She's trying, awkwardly, to shift herself into something that might meet instructions that he hasn't given her. Trying for a smile that'll please him—which means she's trying for several different smiles at once, and that might be what makes him snap. That, followed by all that frustration and the ominous thunderheads of anger behind it, and behind that is something else he still doesn't want to face head-on. He steps forward, grips her by the shoulders and spins her around, practically throws her onto the bed in a tumble of glittering red and crimson feathers.

He can't see her eyes. He can't see all of the way the suit doesn't fit her. He sees the curve of her ass and the arch of her back as she pushes herself up on her hands, the coil of her glossy hair—she isn't trying to turn, she must be gathering that he wouldn't have put her on the bed this way if it isn't how he wanted her. If anything she's encouraging him, pushing her ass high into the air and presenting herself to him—and letting out a surprised little yelp when he shoves her upper body down.

That time she stays put, breathing hard and glancing over her shoulder when she hears the clink of his belt. “Eyes front,” he growls, and she complies, the feathers of the mask fluttering. He realizes dimly that he doesn't want to look at her eyes but he also doesn't want her to see _him,_ to see what those eyes will do as he draws out his cock and strokes himself—rough, impatient, because he’s not hard enough, because this _isn't_ _right_.

Still working himself, he reaches out, curls his fingers around the waistband of her trousers and yanks hard. Hears the fabric rip, hears her soft cry. She's wearing nothing underneath it and it's all there, open to him, the slick pink of her cunt wreathed with dark curls and her legs spreading to allow him easier access to it.

Tearing the trousers even more.

He grits his teeth and grips her one-handed by the waist, and he's in her with a single ruthless thrust, and when she cries out again there's something in it that makes it better.

Because it doesn't sound pained. Because it sounds as if she might like it. Probably it's a lie, but all of this is.

The first woman he's been with since… and it's like this.

She keeps making those breathy little cries and moans as he clasps her with both hands and fucks her deep and hard and fast, his harsh grunts thankfully not enough to drown her out. And yes, she's obviously faking some of it, maybe all, but he doesn't care anymore; his eyes are half closed and unfocused, the world a wash of blurry red, and it might be her. It might. It's all wrong but he's better at lying to himself than he ever wanted to believe and maybe he can do that again now, give himself a taste of what he wants if he refuses to allow himself the entire thing.

And she's rolling her hips back and clenching herself around him, the simulation of tightness, and _her,_ her with her hand nestled into his and the quiet exaltation he felt as he entered the hall with her, her bold perfection, the way she laid claim to him in the garden even if she didn't fully comprehend that she was doing it, her cool wet knuckles against his lips, the taste of her mouth, her fingers plunging into herself, her body shuddering as her orgasm took her, and the whisper that destroyed him.

 _Corvo_.

He hooks an arm around her chest and hauls her up against him, and she whines and gropes at him as he bends her spine far past what's comfortable. Whines again as he snarls in her ear.

“ _Say_ _it_. Say it _now_.”

It comes out strained and quavering. Not _her_ voice. Nothing like her voice. In this moment of insanity he could kill her for that, for the sin of not being enough.

But it does come.

“Oh, _father_.”

He wrenches out of her just in time, adorns all that red sparkle in milky ropes of semen… and behind the ripples of dense pleasure slamming into him and pushing another snarl out of him, it's empty. It’s dry.

He releases her and she falls.

~

There was no way he was going to linger. He doesn't. He leaves her where she's lying, does up his fly and buckles his belt, turns away. Suddenly he doesn't want to look at her anymore. She's remained on her stomach and her face isn’t visible, but far from maintaining the illusion, all she's doing is calling attention to its falsehood.

He won't consider this a mistake. He supposes that he did get something out of it. But he can't have imagined it would go the way he wanted.

He picks up his coat and reaches into the lining, produces a heavy pouch of coin. It's easily equal to what he's already paid. She's finally, cautiously turning over when he sets it on the bureau, and her gaze flicks from him to it and back again.

Her mask is off—literally, it fell off at some point although he missed exactly when, but also in every other way, the facade of desire replaced by something grasping and calculating as she regards the pouch.

He pulls on his coat. “That's for you. All of it. I'll tell Madame as much.” He pauses, then gestures at her. At the suit. “Have that cleaned and mended and send me the bill. But keep it. I might want to use it again.”

She swallows, nods. Most of her hair has come lose from its pins and now, seeing her this way, the resemblance isn't what he initially thought when he first laid eyes on her.

But it might be the best he can do. For now.

“One more thing,” he says, halting just as he's turning to the door. He faces her again; she's frozen in the act of rising, her body already angled toward the bureau. He's sure she was going to get her hands around that pouch as quickly as possible, as if someone might jump out from under the bed and try to snatch it from her. But now she stops and looks up at him, apprehensive.

Moreso when he steps closer and leans in.

She licks her lips. “My Lord?”

He can't possibly be the first man who's come here and asked for such a fantasy, no. But not like him. None like him. He’s not just a man.

And she's not just his daughter.

“Tell anyone about this,” he says softly. “Anyone at all. Breathe one single word. And I will know.” He reaches out and glides a finger down her jaw to the point of her chin. “And you will die.”

She says nothing else. She's still immobile, staring after him with her green, green eyes, when he leaves the room.

 


	19. her eyes, she's on the dark side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo has spent the last eight years locked onto a path he now can't escape from - and that path is sloping down and down and down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh for the love of god Corvo could you just 
> 
> ❤️

And in the meantime he hunts with her, and it's head-rending ecstasy.

Not every night. Not even most nights. He spaces it out, keeps it to once a week if that often, and some of it is that he’s still adopting the strategy of easing her into it, and some of it is also that he still needs nights all to himself—or as close to that as he can get anymore, as close to it as he wants to get—where he can break away from the mock-justice he allows her to believe they're handing out and instead hurls himself into the blood and the savagery, disregarding the ludicrous notion of innocence, disregarding everything except what he wants. In the ruins of long-abandoned buildings, in the alleys of slums, in secluded courtyards and parks, even in the chambers of the wealthy and influential, he chokes the air with screams and paints the walls with blood.

He still wants that. He still needs it. He's all but certain that he always will. But she's not ready for it.

So those are some of the reasons he keeps their hunting trips relatively infrequent. But it's more than that. 

It's that when he's with her that way, when he watches her bury her sword in a man’s stomach and unleash the slippery tangle of his guts, when she slits this throat or slices off those limbs, when she whirls and dances with her sword and laughs for joy in the carnage she's created…

The heat that rises in him threatens more and more to rip through his efforts to contain it. He looks at her, red spattered with red, and he wants her so ferociously that he could immolate himself.

He's not sure he would call it _lust_. It's something above and beyond and also below that. He wants to possess her, to consume her, to devour her alive. He also wants to fall down at her feet and lick the blood from her boots and implore her to rule him. Hurt him, if she wants to. Allow him pleasure if by some miracle she finds him worthy.

For the last few years his trajectory has been all bent toward this point, where he takes what he wants and coldly disregards any other consideration. Where, in fact, the more horrendous his crimes, the greater enjoyment he finds in them. The direct lineage, as he thought of Daud, from the chaos of the Rat Plague to the edge of chaos he constantly treads now, the equilibrium he helps her to maintain while subtly laying the groundwork for endless possibilities of catastrophe. He's started to make special lists of diplomats and officials and nobility of Morley, Serkonos, and Tyvia. He's begun to make a close study of their political systems, looking for hidden cracks and weaknesses, for stress points that might be exploited. From the chaos he could create, one might draw greater power. He hated politics but he was also a skilled student of it—he had to be, and not merely to facilitate his own movement through that world.

To understand a thing, you must know how to destroy it. And it's also true that when you destroy a thing, you reveal how it always worked.

If there comes a time, he’ll be ready. He’ll be able to give her the tools to dismantle and destroy and—if she wishes, if it would amuse her—perhaps build something new. He’ll be able to give her what he can do.

His trajectory has been bent toward this point, this near-apex of bloody hedonism. But he looks at her, thinks of her, and he knows he would give it all up to her control if she demanded it. He would give her anything.

He looks at her, both when she kills and when she sits on her throne and holds court, and he sees a Jessamine Kaldwin from a Void-born nightmare, the same nightmare that created him, and he thinks of how, if Jessamine _had_ commanded him to service her, to give her his body without any expectation of love or affection, he would have done it. He would have been unhesitating.

In the depths of himself, even then, he was capable of this kind of abject worship.

But he also wants her. By the _Void,_ he wants her. He watches her kill gang members, thieves and cutthroats and rapists, smugglers of drugs and humans, the ferocious righteousness lighting up her face and the uncomplicated cruelty in her eyes, and he takes them both home and goes to his chambers and lies on his bed or reclines in the bath and takes hold of his cock and strokes himself to the very edge and stops, lingers there as fitful shudders roll through him and a throbbing ache flares in his core, soaks in the pain like the hot water swirling around him and whispers her name. The candlelight flickers against his closed eyelids like dappled sunshine blurred into a bad dream. Now and then a shadow devours the light and a cold hand closes around his shaft and drags him roughly through and over the edge even as he's whimpering _no, no, please, I can't, please…_

The Outsider grips him by the hair and forces him to lick his own come off those cold fingers.

Doesn't have to force him very hard.

He goes back to the Golden Cat. He goes back more than once. The girl he had the first time is waiting for him, and this time he doesn't have to prompt her—and apparently she's not only more comfortable with his peculiarity but she's been considering what he wants, what might satisfy him better this time, because it is better. She still can't achieve Emily’s proud bearing, her confidence and the violence now thrumming beneath her skin, but she abandons all those coquettish poses, the ridiculous false seduction, and she's straightforward with him. She banishes all the nonsense. She dresses for him and obeys with a loose sigh as he turns her over, and she doesn't simply kneel there and take it as he fucks her; she rears back and hooks an arm around his neck and hisses when he yanks the bodice down and kneads her breast, pinches her nipple. It feels real.

Hell, for her it might be the closest thing to honesty that she's usually able to get.

He does believe that it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she's genuinely enjoying herself more now. He's better to her, slightly more considerate although not remotely out of any sense of obligation. He shoves his hand between her thighs and into the torn trousers and with slick fingers he rubs her clit until she comes, and he doesn't think she's faking it, at least not all the time.

Only the words ring obviously false, and not just because their voices don't match. She doesn't like saying it. She does it for him, not least because he consistently leaves an enormous tip, but her hoarse moans of _oh father, that's so good, fuck me, father, fuck me harder, I love it, yes_ are flat beneath the affected lust.

He always wants to hit her then. He doesn't. It disturbs him that he wants to, which he knows is comically ridiculous; he’s murdered women. He’s played with their corpses like dolls. He's dismembered them and arranged their severed limbs in creative patterns. Yet confronting that he might want to _hit_ one who hasn't attacked him, that beating her for merely being imperfect might be satisfying, shakes him more than a little.

It's different. He can't say why, but it's different. It's a different kind of cruelty, one that even now he finds distasteful.

But he doesn't care about her. He doesn't feel anything for her. If she betrayed him he would kill her and it would be easy, and he wouldn't think of her again afterward.

The Outsider doesn't mock him for any of this conflict. They stroll together through the streets, flit across the rooftops, and the Outsider says nothing about it. Once more, Corvo senses that he's waiting for something.

_We’ll see._

Months pass. He treads along that edge. He and Emily don't hunt every night but they do practice every morning, and every time she leaves the yard with her body's weapon sharper and more honed. She's halfway from seventeen to eighteen and the resemblance to a harder, colder version of Jessamine in his eyes intensifies. She no longer even vaguely looks like a child. She's a _woman,_ and the last paltry visual blocks he had against the full force of his hunger for her crumble to dust.

And the first time she beheads a man in one stroke is almost, finally, too much for him to bear.

~

But he replays it over and over in his mind. To tease himself, to torture himself, to sharpen his desire to a keen edge, to boil his lust and his love in the confines of his skull.

He sees it unfold before his inner eyes.

Only one that night. A particular man; the Bottle Street Gang split into three warring factions after Slackjaw’s death, each headed by one of his former lieutenants, and he's selected the worst of the three for her to take down. They were waiting for him in the parlor of his large but shabby Distillery District apartment. He drew his pistol and she knocked it out of his hand but purposefully left the hand intact, and when he backed toward the door and then whirled and sprinted away, she followed him through the window, waited for him to emerge from the one available exit into the street, and from there she chased him.

She had done this before, played with them this way. But not with so much patience, so much restraint. She let him see her leaps, the dark red shadow of her sometimes sprinting along the eaves and sometimes darting through the street behind him, always close but never quite catching him, driving him onward. She began to head him off, steering him away from certain intersections and larger streets, and Corvo realized at some point that she was driving him toward a dead end—the yard and distillery where Slackjaw made his first headquarters, now long derelict.

The man must not have been thinking, must at that point have fallen into a blind panic, because otherwise he would have understood what she was doing. He would have been trying to push back against the way she was pushing him. He didn't; he kicked open the door to the yard and charged through, and that's when she went for him, threw herself down and rolled on the dirt, came up with her sword at his throat. 

He managed to block her with his whaler’s machete and knocked it away, wrenched himself backward and searched wildly for an opening. She hung back, let him circle. The yard was drenched in moonlight, and her red was nearly as black as his, and the bald terror shone like tears in his eyes.

He clearly grasped now that he had nowhere left to run. Because with a furious, hopeless cry he lunged at her, and she allowed him to just barely graze her arm and get in another clumsy attack before she spun away and kicked the legs out from under him and sent him down.

And she began to take him apart.

Corvo observed her, crouched on the pipe from which she dropped. He saw as she took the man’s sword hand off and then the other—and while it wasn't the first time she had done it, there was something new in it now. It was in her eyes, beyond her customary cruelty; she had always been pragmatic in that way, and now it was gone, and she was taking her time with him, stepping back a little to watch him stagger around, waving the prodigiously bleeding stumps of his wrists and sobbing with pain and fear.

She was smiling. He could see even through the kerchief: it was a horrible smile.

He was so hard.

She toyed with him. The man was obviously near to crumpling from shock and blood loss but suddenly he was trying to run again. She went after him and sliced across his back, cut deep into his arm—careful cuts, designed not to draw much more blood than she had already spilled, but he whined every time and somehow found the strength to take another step. Another. With her every advance more heat flooded between Corvo’s legs and he gritted his teeth; it would be so easy to reach down and palm himself, squeeze, give himself even a little friction and he didn't; he suffered that heat as he watched her slowly kill her prey, rocking his hips uselessly against the air, and it got worse and worse and _better._

So much better. Every splash of blood into the dirt and he throbbed from the root of his cock all the way to the head and bit back his groan, though there was no way she was going to hear it, so immersed was she in what she was doing. But he was thinking of crouching in her room and watching her touch herself, bringing herself up to that precipice and throwing herself off, and what he might have done if he had been in the shape of a man that night, even if he never touched her what he might have done to himself with his hands, his eyes locked on her, pleasure hammering against his skull, how good it would have been to reach his climax at the same moment she did, how amazing—

She cut off her prey’s head and seconds later that climax took him.

He was already struggling but it hit him out of nowhere, an orgasm like a slap in the face, and he curled inward and whined through his teeth and battled back his trembling. Coming without a finger laid on himself, coming like a _gunshot,_ gazing at her as she stood and breathed and her head lolled back, her spine beautifully curved.

_Arching like that as she stares at her kill and he takes her from behind and makes her his._

_Emily,_ he breathed, and at that moment she turned and looked up at him, and for a blinding instant he was certain she knew. He was certain she knew everything.

Not a single flicker in her eyes. If she knew, she was showing him no evidence of it.

He Blinked down to her, stood a little way behind her and regarded her work.

“It takes force to behead a man,” she said, and laughed that rich, wonderful laugh.

“Yes,” he murmured, and although it felt like a gamble to touch her at all, like it might be what would send it spinning totally out of control, he laid his hand on her shoulder. “I told you. I told you someday you'd be strong enough.”

He was so proud of her and he loved her so much and he wanted, so badly, to shove her into the bloody dirt and fuck her until she was wailing.

“I love you,” she whispered, and he couldn't help his low, soft moan.

“Sweetheart,” he said, also barely more than a whisper, and he curled his arms around her waist and kissed the crown of her head. She had turned to face away from him again. He didn't quite let his lower body touch hers. It was actually good, he considered, that he had come already. Otherwise he might be nudging her ass with his erection, and wouldn't that be a thing to explain. 

_Unless you wouldn't have to, Corvo. Unless she would already be in flawless accord with you._

_I can't,_ he thought. _I can't do it._

A quiet chuckle. He'd heard that before. _Well. We’ll see_.

~

She turns eighteen. After that, there truly is no going back.

 


	20. it's strange what desire will make foolish people do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the eve of Emily's eighteenth birthday, she and Corvo once again attend the Boyles' party. They're treading along an edge - fortunately they're very good at moving together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You better believe I have a Spotify playlist for this fic and you better believe [this is the first track on it.](https://youtube.com/watch?v=8-2hUmoaPfU) Feels like it might fit right into this particular chapter even if the music itself isn't... well, you'll see. 
> 
> Almost there aaaaaaaaaaaah
> 
> ❤️

He doesn't know for a fact that she's ready. But at some point you need to have faith.

And he does, in her. In her and in everything she is—from this moment now until the last moment of his existence, he will have faith in her. When his faith in everything else including himself is lying dead and cold as a stone in his chest, there will be her.

_My child._

_My love._

~

Her seventeenth birthday was a gala occasion. Her eighteenth is baroque enough to render it mundane.

The celebrations begin a full week prior. He naturally takes the lead in organizing them, with her consultation. Once she would have thrown herself into the planning with unchecked enthusiasm—the grandest cakes anyone has ever seen and the sky awash in fireworks even in the middle of the day, and the Wrenhaven a solid mass of the Imperial Navy—but now she takes it on with only a sense of somewhat grudging obligation. It's been explained to her by two of her more canny advisors that the citizens will be expecting it, and Corvo said nothing to gainsay them. They're correct; not only will the citizenry be expecting it, but they'll be disappointed and disposed to grumble if it doesn't happen. And it's not a bad idea at this point to placate them. The harsh oppression of the months of gang wars is long behind them now, and the inhabitants of Dunwall have settled back into their customary inertia—not inclined to make trouble, not after having been repeatedly reminded of what's likely to happen to them if they do—and their lives have been easy enough that they've accepted a regime that none of them particularly likes. But while they're not exactly on the verge of breaking out into open rebellion, tossing them some bread and and putting on some circuses will doubtless not go amiss.

His dreams are laced with the tantalizing prospect of a far greater chaos than any he's yet experienced. But this isn't the right time, and he doesn't yet have the pieces in the right positions on the board.

That'll come.

So they make plans for street festivals and parades and sports, public theater productions in the honor of the Empress, and the owners of pubs and cafes paid by the Crown to offer free drinks and food at specific times. And there's a healthy degree of what Emily would have asked for in another life. Bakeries are indeed commissioned to produce massive cakes with elaborate decorations of spun sugar and meringue. The Navy’s most impressive frigates and battleships sail in formation down the Wrenhaven, flying kingsparrow banners and firing gunpowder from their cannons and heavy guns in thunderous salute to the name of Emily Kaldwin the First. At night, thunderstorms of fireworks.

And the balls, of course. Reception after reception, ball after ball, the usual diplomats and dignitaries and the nobility piled on top of each other, preening and fawning and wrestling each other for her Imperial Majesty’s gracious attention. She doesn't actually attend many of these, and he doesn't attempt to push her into doing so. In every important and legal respect, she's no longer a child, totally leaving aside the fact that she took leave of her childhood years ago.

Instead he carefully selects the ones at which it would be most politically advantageous to make an appearance, and convinces her to go with the promise that she won't have to stay long. With, in addition, the subtle implication that there's a lovely surprise waiting for her at the end of all of this.

Which indeed there is.

As before, one of the balls—again, as before, set for the day before her birthday itself—is at the Boyle’s. Last year it was ostentatious to the point of tastelessness; this year the gaudiness is almost nauseating. Every surface wound with red and gold ribbons, curtains of streamers dangling from the chandeliers, endless draperies of the finest brocade Tyvia has to offer, canopies strung with wildly multicolored glass beads from the renowned artisans of Wei-Ghon. The confetti is real silver shavings, in sufficient quantities to feed five Karnacan miner families for a year. Every oil-fed light glows in an intricately carved flute of Morleyan crystal. The food—every conceivable dish from every part of the Isles seems to be represented, but rather than presenting an attractive spread, the smells wafting from each platter mingles together in a sickeningly powerful odor, choked with spices that numb the tongue.

The wine and champagne pour from enormous gilded fountains and splash across the tables and floor. Easily half the people in attendance are drunk within the first two hours. It's another masked ball, and guests stagger through the crowd with their costumes askew, shedding sequins and feathers, treading on each other's expensive shoes as they weave unsteadily back and forth in a grotesque parody of a dance, howling laughter and shouting to be heard over the jangle of the music.

Corvo and Emily haven't come masked.

He is cloaked in the same black he wore before. For her part, Emily was baffled and a bit annoyed by how her own costume seemed to have mysteriously vanished, and one of the chambermaids was blamed and sacked. But he had another one made for her, almost identical to the first, and she appeared to quickly forget about it.

And now once more she's a dream of glittering scarlet.

Ordinarily it might be sniffed at, wearing the same ensemble two seasons in a row. But no one dares to sniff at them, and they cleave through the assembly like a blade through skin.

They don't plan it. It simply happens. Mingling, drifting apart for a few moments and then making their customary way back toward each other, he emerges from a dizzying haze of color and sound, and he and Emily are standing face to face in the center of the floor set aside for the dancing as the party swirls around them. He has no eyes or ears for any of it; they might as well be alone. She's gazing up at him—only at him, and he watches her lips part, full and painted a shocking bloody red, and she soundlessly mouths his name.

His hand settles at her waist and her own hand fits so easily into his, and accompanied by music that seems to have little to do with them, they begin to move.

He's danced with her before. He used to dance with her when she was small; she would stand on his feet and giggle as he held her hands and spun her in slow circles, and she usually ended up being swung up into his arms and spun faster and faster until her giggling turned to laughing shrieks for him to stop or she would be sick all over him. After which he would let her go and of course it would only be a short time before she was demanding that he do it again.

But since those days, he hasn't often done it.

He certainly hasn't danced with her like _this._

He leads and she follows and in an echo of those days he turns them in a slow circle, her feet moving in perfect nimble time with his and her hand nestled into his palm—smoothly, gracefully, changing and box-stepping, the way her form seems to flow along with him into the steps, rising and falling with the sweeping rhythm. Where did she learn to do this so expertly? He knows she's been instructed by governesses as she's learned all her royal manners and graces, but surely mere rote instruction couldn't raise her to these heights, and in any case he's seen her dance, and there’s no resemblance to now. This total sync with him, as if she knows what his body is going to do the second before it happens.

It comes to him all at once, then, where she's gained this ability: The yard. Her sword in her hand, feinting and advancing and dodging, quick and sure in each stance; to anticipate his movements she learned every trick and tell his body could reveal to her no matter how hard he tried to conceal it. When she found his fighting rhythm and matched it, it was less a clash than an effortless melding. They were inside each other, singular.

Naturally she dances with him this way. She couldn't not.

But now the flowing waltz is slipping into something else. He doesn't intend for it to happen; he merely observes as it does and puts no conscious thought into it. It occurs to him that she's half leading, and that rather being thrown into clumsy missteps, both of them are seamlessly accommodating their joined movements to the altered dynamics. He's beginning to recognize these steps—nothing so refined and genteel as a waltz, although elements of the waltz linger, but instead transmuting in a kind of dangerous alchemy into a dance he knows even better, knows in his very bones.

A pretty barmaid he took a fancy to at the uncomfortable age of twelve was the first to initiate him into it. She was nineteen if she was a day and he never had a chance with her, and he was in full possession of that fact, but she had a soft spot for him nonetheless, the softness a big sister feels for a slightly bratty little brother—and oh, didn't that cut him deep when not long after he lost the one true sister he had—and when he saw her turning across the ancient floorboards with one of the patrons, he was instantly firm in his conviction that she should teach him. That he should dance with her better than that ungainly drunken dockworker twice her age who stepped all over his own feet while she whirled around him, the sine wave of her shape accentuated by the tightness of her breeches and corset.

And she taught him; otherwise he never got more than a kiss on the cheek from her but in the alley behind the pub she threaded her fingers through his and guided him into it as her older brother grinned and played the guitar—his plucking fingers raising a sound more like a drum than a melody. The warm salt wind off the water. The tuneless singing of the longshoremen in the street as they made their way toward home and bed. The scuffle and clack of her worn shoes on the cobbles playing counterpoint to the strings. The strong swell of her calf. The delicate turn of her ankle. The flash of her smile, bright and unmediated as the streetlights.

She taught him and he learned. At the cusp of adolescence, with his body demanding that he reacquaint himself with it all over again, he learned two new things about it, two tasks for which it was unusually well suited. One he was trained in by that barmaid and all the experience that followed.

The other, with the sword, he somehow simply knew.

He’s sure he never taught Emily this dance. That doesn't seem to matter. She knows it like she learned it before she could walk. She knows it like it’s in her blood.

_Like he gave it to her._

Before, the rhythm was an elegant rise and fall, the undulation of waves offshore. The elegance hasn't fled, but the rhythm is speeding up, tripping along in beats barely controlled and yet so precise, surging into that familiar overarching flow. The simplicity of her steps is transforming into something quicker and as precise as the beat as she takes both his hands and darts away from him, spins back in close and once more away. He spins to meet her and pulls her against him, releases her, twirls and twists their arms and watches, entranced, as she responds in kind. The pivot of her wrists and pelvis. The red curve of her lips is all mischief as he hooks his arm around her waist and swings her outward, and the two of them move flawlessly in the steps of the _Calanto,_ the most infamous of the Serkonan dances. Scandalous to the more prudish sensibilities. The Abbey has declared it a filthy practice, an avenue to the most wanton of flesh.

And so it frequently is.

He reels with her, aware of nothing but their feet and her hands and her beaming, almost gleeful smile. Strands of hair have come loose from their coil and fly in soft tendrils around her face, and he fights back the urge to reach out without missing a step and pluck out the pins, let the rest of that black mane cascade around her shoulders and whip into motion with her as she dances. Set it _free,_ all of her free and loose and so maddeningly beautiful—and even faster, wilder, everything surging into the crescendo that was building from the first step, and with a sharp flex of his arms at the climax of the beat he drags her in and clasps her to him, his knee maneuvering its way between hers and immediately locking straight, and as she lets out a little gasp he drops her low over his arm, her spine arched and her hips thrust forward and her head fallen back to expose the working column of her throat.

Everything stops.

Suddenly, like a curtain being ripped down— _I tear down the curtain and reveal what was always there_ —he's aware that the room is silent. No plink-warble of the band, no shrill chatter, no raucous bellows of laughter. The sheer amount of _space_ around them, the echo of their rapid breathing too loud off the polished marble. He raises his eyes from her and something in him turns over with distant unease; the rest of the dancers have drawn back in a wide, nervous circle, leaving the floor almost entirely to the two of them.

Every eye on them. Staring. Some of the ladies have laid their hands over their mouths, and their shock might not be solely demure affectation.

Emily is still practically straddling his thigh, her chest heaving and her grip tight on his bicep, her other arm swept back over her head. Exquisitely frozen in the dance’s final ecstatic pose.

There is no hiding this.

There's also little room for varied interpretations, for those willing to go so far as to interpret. They all saw it. And yes, a father may waltz with his daughter—at a party, at a ball, at her wedding banquet. There's nothing whatsoever unseemly about that.

But that's not how he was dancing with her.

Slowly, he straightens and brings her with him, and when they're both solidly upright he releases her and she steps back. She's panting. So is he. Her dark eyes are sparkling with something he can't hope to define.

They can't hide what just happened. It would be ludicrous to try and would doubtless only make bad worse. So then he'll take the one attitude he can.

That there was nothing to hide.

The very picture of gentility, he bows low. A second or two later and she returns the bow. And that much is proper, it would be the wisest thing to end it there and go their separate ways and carry on with the evening at a safe distance from each other, but while this new and terrible Corvo Attano is cunning, calculating, and altogether a lord of pitiless guile, he's not what anyone would call _wise_.

And he would claim nothing else.

He bows again, takes her hand in his and presses his lips to her knuckles, and without lifting his head or breaking the kiss he raises his eyes to hers and moves not a single muscle as something like the threatening spark of an arc pylon stabs across the space between them.

No one will make anything of this. No one will dare, and in any case it's a possibility so troubling that most will dismiss it. But regardless, it comes to him then that he doesn't much care what they saw.

Neither does she.

~

He doesn't know whether or not Esma Boyle saw them dance. If she did, she doesn't mention it, and even if she was planning to do so, he’d guess that he drives it right out of her besequined head when he pushes her into a murky corner of the servant’s back stair, tips her mask aside and tilts her face up to his and kisses her long and hungry. She sighs and rakes her tapered nails over his scalp and deepens the kiss, her tongue seeking his and her lips plump and tasting of sugared pears, and he allows her to feel how hard he is, nudging against her belly.

She doesn't need to know that his arousal has nothing to do with her.

Except in all honesty, part of it does. It's the same reason he might be gifting this brief encounter to her, the meagerest scrap of what she's been after all this time, although to an equal degree his mouth and his body against hers are an insult that she’ll only understand later.

After all, tomorrow night is her last.

 


	21. bite the hand to spite the trap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the night of Emily's birthday, Corvo leaves to prepare her gift - for which he'll need some assistance. And first is a conversation with someone he hasn't spoken to for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really am not kidding when I tell you that writing some of these parts does kinda hurt. Like, in a good way I guess but jfc Corvo WHY ARE YOU SO HORRIBLE
> 
> I said in the comments for the last chapter that if you detect romance in this, you're not wrong; this _is_ a romance of the most toxic kind and there are genre tropes that I'm deliberately playing with. 
> 
> But I also really don't want to lose sight of what a truly ghastly personage we're dealing with here. 
> 
> Thanks for reading, you are awesome ❤️

Before he leaves to prepare her birthday present, he does what he hasn't done quite literally in years. He crouches and unlocks the chest, and he lifts out the Heart and cradles it loosely in his hands.

It's silent and motionless and very cold.

He doesn't squeeze it. He merely holds it, straightens up and crosses the room to the balcony that overlooks the grand hall, steps out onto it and surveys all that cold marble and crystal, the dark finished wood and the stone—decorated in ribbons and streamers for the party tonight, although not so lavishly as the throne room and banquet hall. He gazes down at the guards standing motionless on either side of the massive door. They don't raise their eyes to him; possibly they don't know that he's there at all.

But likely they do. Every guard on duty tonight was hand-picked by him alone from the circle of the most trustworthy, and he selected them for that circle in part for their powers of observation and the keenness of their senses. They know he's there. They'll simply betray no sign. One might even believe they were stone themselves, sculpted and painted with unerring skill but still not quite human.

He shifts his gaze to the confection of metal and dry muscle in his palm. Raises it, examines it. The gears behind that little glass window are turning at a fraction of the speed they used to, but turning nonetheless.

She hasn't spoken to him. But she's listening. All this time, she's been listening to everything.

One of the worst possible curses, he reflects coolly. She's condemned to be a helpless observer of a world spiraling into madness. She's been forced to witness the long process of his corruption and how that corruption wouldn't be contained inside him. She's seen and been completely unable to stop the way he's infected everything he can touch and delighted in the disease. He’s unleashed a flood of pestilence. A new plague washing over the city.

 _All drowning in the blood you've spilled._

What did she do for the Outsider to torture her this way? And he knows the answer to that before he even poses himself the question: She did nothing at all, other than all the good she knew how to do. She was innocent. This is a world that torments the innocent precisely for the crime of being so, and crushes them into bloody paste underfoot when it's bored with them.

The innocent, the good… They don’t survive. Almost without exception, they live in misery and they die. The wicked are the ones who prosper. So what he's done to Emily, _for_ Emily, is why she'll always be safe.

At some point a monster grows so enormous in its monstrosity that no other monster can touch it.

“I know you hate me,” he says softly.

The Heart stirs. _I don't hate you._ She pauses. _It would be so much easier if I could. I love you. Even now, I love you. You've become a beast and a fiend, you rejoice in the worst imaginable crimes, you have made it your work to destroy everything I tried so hard to build, and you know that it's only a matter of a very short time before you completely defile our daughter. She wouldn't think to resist you. She would welcome you into her bed, be welcomed into yours. You have taught her to exult in every twisted attention you bestow upon her. You have taught her well. And yet I love you. It is my true prison._

 _I have wondered, more than once in all these long and terrible years, whether_ you _hate_ me. _I feel you must. You could not possibly have done these things to me if you did not. You could not possibly do all the things you intend to do._

He doesn't respond immediately. He steps to the balcony’s railing and lays his free hand on it, curls his fingers around the cold iron. All at once he imagines hurling the Heart to the floor far below, watching the glass and gears shatter and the flesh smash against the marble tile.

He knows, without having to consider it for more than half a second, that it would be a release for her. That it would be kindness.

Which is why he won't do it.

“All I feel is hate,” he whispers. “Except for her. And him.”

 _Your_ lover. _What an obscenity that word is when attached to you. To the abomination that lies between you._ The Heart trembles, and after a moment he realizes that she's laughing bleakly. _You love him, yes. You love them both, to the extent that you are still capable of anything anyone would recognize as love. But you hate them as well. You hate them and love them in equal measure._ Another pause. _Will that destroy you in the end, I wonder?_

He cocks his head, his brow furrowed. “You don't know?”

_The future is nearly dark for me now. Perhaps because I don't want to see it. Perhaps your lover is finally being merciful to me._

“Do you remember when I took you into the safe room the night I killed Burrows?” His lips pull into a sardonic curve and he continues before she can answer. “Of course you do. You remember everything.”

 _Yes. You played my final message to her._

“Did I?” His tone is musing. “I was never sure about that afterward.”

 _You did. And then once all your bloody work was done, you hid it away and you never let her hear it._

He genuinely forgot that. For some reason he can't quite pin down, it troubles him.

_That moment was your last chance, my love. My cruel, wretched love. That moment, sitting there and watching the blood drip from your hands onto the floor, you still could have turned away from what you've become. The damage you did to your own soul would never have healed, but you would have been a sad, wounded man instead of a monster. If only you had shown the slightest mercy. If only you had tempered your vengeance. If only you had chosen truth instead of death._

“I think I do hate you,” he murmurs. So tenderly, he's caressing the glass pane with his thumb. “Because you could have kept it all from happening. If you hadn't been so _good,_ if you had been able to see the men around you for what they were, if you hadn't been so stupid as to trust any of them… You wouldn't have died. Emily wouldn't have been taken. And I wouldn't have suffered.”

 _Do you believe that?_

“I know it's true.”

 _Then you were as hopelessly stupid as I was. Because you didn't see it either. You were the Royal Protector and you failed to protect._

Every word is the coil of a whip braided with shards of glass, lashing out to strike across his skin. Once every single one of those words would have flayed him to the core. He would have screamed his throat raw with the agony of them. For six months in Coldridge, he did.

That was then. That was before a god took him and Marked him, and hatred became a thing he loved.

“That man is dead,” he says, still a murmur. Still tender. “That man laid himself down in your blood and died with you.” His smile is a savage thing. “And good fucking riddance.”

~

It might be something of a cliché, that he arrives at the mansion just as the clock strikes midnight in the distance. But the truth is that he's been trading in clichés. The Dunwall Butcher—that's certainly a cliché. The lurking power behind an increasingly corrupt throne—such a cliché, sure as night. This story has a pattern, and without being particularly troubled by it, he's long since begun to sense that it's a very old one. The Outsider might be entranced by Corvo’s sheer extremity, but Corvo is confident that if not for that extremity, he might be yet another dull tyrant making brutal use of the power he's been given and therefore worthy of nothing but indifference.

But the Outsider declared all those years ago that he was no tyrant. No lord or emperor or dictator. Nor is he a street thug, a cutthroat, or a common criminal.

He didn't set out on this murderous path in the name of being _interesting_.

As it turns out, murder is sufficient in and of itself as an end.

He arrives at the mansion and at first does nothing else. He crouches in the shadows, in the garden, and inhales the heady scent of lillies and listens to the dense tones of the hour-chime. Out in the streets Dunwall is still celebrating the birthday of their Empress, but he's seen to it that the Boyles were called back early to their house by an unspecified emergency, and he followed them to make sure they went. Barely seconds ago he watched them enter.

They'll find the house oddly empty. Unless they look in the cellar—the same cellar in which he killed their sister—and discover what's left of the servants.

He almost hopes they do.

But no. He wants them to gradually realize the full horror of what's happening to them, and that only when he's ready for them to do so. What he's seen on hundreds of faces before theirs, like changing seasons: the transformation of surprise into panic into terror into desperate hope… and finally into the helpless despair that comes when one comprehends that there truly is no escape.

He's seen it before. He's done it before. But this time is special. It's special because it's not only for him; he wants it, he intends to take full advantage of the pleasure of witnessing it, but this is a gift and he wants it to be as perfect as the woman he's going to give it to, and for that he's going to need a little help.

And because it's not singly for his benefit, he feels justified in asking for it.

 _So ask,_ murmurs a voice from the darkness behind him—jagged darkness spreading out to enfold him like an embrace of thorns. _It's purely a formality at this point, but formalities are sometimes worth going through._

“You saw this moment,” he whispers. His cowl is pulled up over his head, but the death mask is in his hand. The air is pleasantly cool on his exposed face. The cold he's grown to love so much runs beneath it like a current at the nadir of an ocean trench. “You always knew we would be here.”

A sigh—he detects equal parts exasperation and affection. _You still don't understand how this works. There is no one way events can unfold. I see the possibilities. I extrapolate. I perceive the landscape through which the river must run and I can discern the shape of a thousand of its variations. But its ultimate course remains unknown even to me until that course is taken._

Hands close on his shoulders—light as the wings of a moth, but he shudders and his knees weaken. It's a source of sardonic amusement to him that at first he mistrusted this being, then resented him, then fearfully desired him, and now rests in hopeless thrall to him, more completely enslaved than any of his other pitiful and ignored supplicants.

And hates him, yes. As with everything else, she was right about that.

His hatred of the entire universe is as eternal as the Void. He wonders if it might outlive him in his immensity, take on its own form and stand alone and free of him when his body finally falls.

 _I glimpsed this moment. I didn't know it would happen until now._ Lips graze his ear—and when the Outsider speaks again, there's something else in his voice, heard before but not often. Hidden, Corvo thinks. But not hidden perfectly. The faintest tremble.

That night on the rooftop above them. The ferocious need, what it felt like when the Void itself wanted to fuck you. What he whispered then. _Maybe I should ask what you're doing to me._

Every word is like the echo of a kiss. _I longed for it. Yes, I'll admit that. I did. I'm not… accustomed to_ longing _for anything, but for this, for tonight, for what you intend… I did. I do. I should like to see it. I should like that very much._

A flutter of the dark like the explosion of a murder of crows, and he's standing in front of Corvo, long hands against his chest, bone-white on black. All bone and black, the pair of them.

Red, soon.

The Outsider gazes up at him, unblinking, and his expression matches his voice—the tremble nearly undetectable but the dim wonder obvious in his usually unreadable eyes. A gleam of colorless light at the bottom of a well. _You've changed me, Corvo. I don't know how you did that, I don't even understand just how much, but it's true._ Nothing _should be able to do that, nothing in this world or any other… and yet you have._

His lips twitch. _How dare you._

Corvo closes a hand around one of those slender wrists, the knob of bone fitting perfectly into his palm—the Marked hand, and as he touches the Outsider it pulses not like an arc pylon warming up but like a dreadful, inhuman heart. “I dare.”

 _I know you do. It's why you're precious to me._ The Outsider leans up and ghosts their lips together, and that twitch curls into a smile. _My dear one, my treasure. The most wonderful thing I've ever possessed._ Teeth like a row of knives briefly capture Corvo’s lower lip, bite gently, and he moans. _Which is why I'm going to give you what you want. Your gift to her, my gift to you._

Effortlessly, the Outsider twists his hand loose and threads icy, thin fingers through his—and what pierces the back of his hand and surges up his arm is a memory not of the moment he was first Marked but of that first terrible violation, his first _punishment,_ the way he was ripped open and invaded and filled, and he whimpers softly and without hesitation he yields to it. Welcomes it inside him the way he's welcomed every assault since that night.

Light flares behind his closed eyelids, ruthless as the collapse of a star—subsumed just as quickly by the darkness. Although his eyes remain closed, through the red-black of his own blood he can see the Mark and its heartbeat-pulse.

Stronger now.

 _Until sunrise, any door you choose will open to you, and will be closed to every hand but yours._ The Outsider steps back just as Corvo finally opens his eyes, but doesn't let him go—and that grip tightens and tightens until his bones are popping and cracking and his breath is coming in shallow pulls and he's gritting his teeth against the pain. Reminded, as if he needs reminding, that the Outsider can and is perfectly willing to break even his favorite toy.

 _But my gift has a price. You know what I want in return,_ the Outsider hisses. _Stop denying. Stop_ lying. _Take what you want. Be what you are_.

“A monster,” Corvo gasps—in pain, in pleasure, in the despair of both, in the despair he can't wait to see.

The lovely despair that overflows when one turns and faces the inevitable.

 _Yes. A monster perfected. Purified._ With a wrench that stabs brilliant new pain all through him, he's released, and he stumbles back, wincing and clutching at his hand. The Mark burns through the leather wraps and sears his fingers. The Outsider is laughing as he fades into nothing.

 _Free_.

 


	22. it's in her kiss, the black seal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dunwall celebrates Empress Emily Kaldwin's eighteenth birthday. But Corvo and Emily have their own private - and extremely exclusive - party to attend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, we've had a bit of a gap in updates - I had a con to go to and some truly amazing scotch to stay up all night drinking and the recovery has been a bit slow. I was also an idiot and started another novel before my just-finished one was edited so things might slow down a little for a bit. 
> 
> BUT. Oh boy do we have places to go. 
> 
> ❤️

He doesn’t expect it to take him long, and he’s correct.

They're not stupid, these women. But they're arrogant and spoiled and far too comfortable in a life that's rarely denied them anything, and the brutal murder of their sister eight years ago doesn't appear to have taught them much about self-preservation.

He could take them down immediately but instead, as if it's an appetizer before the main course, he follows them through the empty halls and rooms, listens to their increasingly alarmed calls. For the servants. For anyone. They turn and glance nervously around, and instead of splitting up they inch closer together, practically clinging to each other's arms. Finally aware of how alone they are in such a huge, silent house, every shadow in every corner a potential horror, and a sudden rat scuttling under a chair has Lydia flinging herself at her sister with a shriek.

He toys with the idea of letting them see him before he sends them to sleep. After a few moments of that, watching them hurrying back toward the entrance hall and the door they'll no longer be able to open, he elects to keep things simple for now.

He does have a party to get back to. And Emily is waiting for him, for the surprise he's promised her.

A sleep dart for each, and he puts them to bed.

~

In the Tower the party is indeed still going at full strength, even past midnight. Likely it'll continue into the wee hours. But it doesn't need him or the Empress to carry on; give the esteemed guests food and wine and music and secluded corners to sneak off into and they'll be perfectly satisfied.

She's standing at her window when he Blinks onto the ledge outside and crouches, lays his fingertips against the glass and taps. She’s wearing only her customary simple red, nothing whatsoever unusual or additionally decorative, but in the split second before she moves he wishes she wouldn't, that she'd stay as she is and let him look at her for as long as he wants, just that and nothing more. Feast on her with his eyes if not with his hands and his mouth. It doesn't matter how she's dressed. It isn't about what she is or isn't wearing.

It's her. It's only her.

He could freeze time and have that, for a few moments. Wave his hand and leach the color and the movement out of the world and slip into the room and simply… admire her.

He doesn't. He remains where he is as she ties the kerchief around her face, conceals her mischievous smile with a red curtain. Her sword is already at her hip, and he slides aside to make room for her as she opens the window and climbs easily out into the ledge beside him. Once this would have been precarious for her, made her vaguely nervous, but like so many other things, those days are far behind her now. She moves as if she couldn't possibly fall.

At another time it might worry him a bit, that kind of blithe confidence. It could make her more inclined to make a mistake. But tonight is its own time, as if he's stepped them both outside the normal flow in an instant clearly delineated at the beginning and the end. It isn't only the power the Outsider gave him; there’s more at work here. Somehow he knows, with absolute certainty, that just for tonight nothing in the world can harm them.

She's masked, but he isn't, and as she moves close to him he runs his Marked hand over the black silk of her hair—once more battling back the urge to pull out the pins and let it flow loose over her shoulders. He doesn't. He leans in and presses a kiss to her brow and her eyes flutter closed.

“Are you ready?” he murmurs. Even though he already knows she is.

She draws back enough to look at him and although he can't see her mouth her eyes are beaming a smile at him. He reflects it. Masks himself. Curls his arm around her slim waist.

Blinks them away.

~

He’ll never forget the journey across the rooftops that night.

Since he began this long downward spiral he's rarely had to deny himself anything. Almost everything he wants, sooner or later he's been able to have. Fucking, killing, chaos—it's all been his for the taking in one form or another. But of course there's one thing he's so far kept away from himself, except for the poor illusion of it, and no matter what else he's lusted for, he's been piercingly cognizant of the pleasure that comes between the kindling of the desire and its satisfaction. How good it feels to _want_ something, to feel the need burning through you and smoldering in your core. Soaking in the anticipation of it, like drowning a dish in fine wine before you set it alight. Even putting it off for the sheer delight of not having it. And in fact, the moment he attains it is frequently not equal to the fantasy he created of it.

He hasn't made a regular practice of doing that, other than the customary playing with his prey before he takes them down, but now he catches himself taking a more roundabout route than he needs to, Blinking and leaping and running with her in a wide circuit around the edge of the Estate District before swinging into it. He hasn't told her what's waiting for her, but she must sense what he's doing, and twice she tosses him puzzled looks. But he doesn't explain it. He circles and brings her with him, and he imagines the mansion and the two creatures unconscious inside it, waiting for the horror they don't yet know is coming for them. It shivers hot down his spine and throbs between his legs.

He wonders if she can sense that too.

How much has she gathered and not told him? How much does she really know?

She always saw more than anyone would have believed a small girl could see. She observed everything and she accumulated the knowledge she gleaned into a library in her mind and as she aged into herself she opened the books one by one and drew on her lessons. The ones Burrows and Campbell and the Loyalists taught her about the calculus of power and betrayal, and the ones Corvo taught her about the joys of violence and revenge. There's no possible way she doesn't know more than she's saying.

Tonight he’ll reveal everything. And as they finally turn and travel among the estates and mansions, all the elegant glass and stone and bright lights casting the shadows into even sharper relief, the anticipation of that is driving him deliciously insane.

He's not afraid of how she'll react, what she'll do. It's as the Heart said. He's taught her well. She's on the cusp of it, the last ledge, and he doesn't doubt that she'll be enthusiastic in the fall when she goes over.

She follows him without struggling to keep up, sprinting across the rooftops and nimbly along ventilation pipes, vaulting from balconies. He keeps her always in the periphery of his vision, a flying red-black shade, and he only scoops her into his arms when he has to. Otherwise he allows her to move on her own skill and wits, because she'll be doing that when they reach the mansion. She’s come very close in the last few months to going it alone with minimal guidance from him, largely only observed by him, but this will be the next and final step. He's set the stage for her, but she'll be the one to walk onto it.

He can't wait to see her face when she does.

It would be more in keeping with his usual mode of doing things to enter the mansion via one of the hidden passages or side windows he's used before. It would definitely be more careful. But again, tonight doesn't feel to him like a night where care is necessary. He comes to rest with Emily at the main entrance, lets her slip loose from his embrace, and watches her step forward, raising her head and scanning around—at the hedges, the walls, the gate, the glow of the lamps. Not lit as garishly as it would be for their parties, but at the Boyle mansion it's never truly dark. When she turns there's a silent question in her eyes—but also a sparkle of something revelatory. Excited.

She's already beginning to understand.

She gestures at the closed gate. “Just… walk on through?”

He nods and steps past her, raising his Marked hand. He's tested this new ability, out of necessity as much as curiosity, but he still feels a faint prickle of wonder as instantly the gate swings open. A brush of his fingertips is all it takes.

When they're through, he’ll close it, and it won't open again until dawn.

No one is ever leaving this estate. No one except the two of them.

She draws up beside him, her eyebrows lifting. “I didn't know you could do that.”

“I couldn't before,” he says simply—honesty, but absent any other embellishment. Without another word he steps through, waits for her to follow, pushes the gate closed. As the latch clicks into place the Mark flares hot, and he feels that heat pass through his fingers and into the thick metal.

Emily is standing in the center of the main drive just past the guardhouse—another small pile of corpses in there—when he turns. She's gazing up at the mansion, her head cocked and her hand hovering close to her sword. The garden is without additional illumination but the mansion itself is lit up, windows blazing. Before he left to fetch her he took care to light every chandelier, every lamp. Normally he makes concerted use of any shadow available to him, keeps them close and wraps them around himself like a cloak, but not this time. Not tonight. Tonight he wants every player in this little drama to see the action as clearly as possible.

No hiding. No denying. No lying. _Be_ _what_ _you_ _are_.

Emily glances at him. “I thought they were at the party.”

“They were called away.”

That black sparkle, brighter. _Perfect_. “Do they know we’re coming?”

Behind his mask, his lips twitch. “Yes and no.” He touches her elbow—cups it in his hand, and as he has many times by now, he gently ushers her forward toward the wide steps and the front door, as if he’s her escort for yet another ball.

Which he supposes in a way he is.

She allows herself to be guided. More than guided; she's adopted the same graceful, sweeping movements that she does when preparing to make an appropriately royal entrance. Dressed in black, dressed in red, and as together they climb the steps, as the door opens at his touch and the crystalline gleam of the entrance hall streams over them, he reaches up and removes the mask.

After a few seconds, she follows his lead and pulls down the kerchief. That sparkle isn't confined to her eyes. Not for the first time, a terrible glow seems to be beaming through her very skin.

He turns to her, and he doesn't take his eyes off her as he closes and seals the door with another touch. He can't. He can't look at anything but her. He doesn't think he's ever seen her thrown into this kind of brilliance before, not when she's dressed this way. He's seen her, yes, but only in candlelight and low lamplight and inadequate streetlights. He's prudently kept them to those shadows he's made his friends.

But the hall is devoid of shadows. There's no confetti as there was last night, no rich drapery, no sideboards heaped with food, no crowd of fine nobility. Their every movement echos off the marble and brass. He’d swear her heartbeat is as loud in his ears as his own.

She's turned to face him, one gloved hand in his, gazing up at him with her dancing eyes. They danced right here, him and her. They danced like lovers and everyone watched, and he no longer cares if they fully comprehended what they were seeing. He comprehends. She must. And he’s allowing himself to do what he wanted to before and _look_ at her, his attention brazenly roaming over her body, _indulging_ _his_ _urge_. She's clothed in darkness and blood that clings to her slight, elegant curves and strong angles, her hair pulled back to expose the lovely line of her neck, her throat working as she swallows, and she passes her tongue across her parted lips and they glisten.

Strip those curves bare and explore them with his hands. Run his fingers through that hair. Kiss a path up that working throat. Taste those wet lips and chase that tongue with his own.

He's damned.

“You're so beautiful,” he whispers, and she sighs as her eyes flutter closed.

“Corvo.”

He reaches up and skates his fingertips over the high ridge of her cheekbone—and he thinks about doors and the opening of them and how tonight any of them he chooses will obey him.

“I'm the Butcher,” he says quietly, and her eyes fly open.

No surprise in them.

“I know,” she murmurs—slowly. “I always knew, didn't I?”

Of course she did. He smiles and his fingertips travel down to the corner of her mouth.

“Not everyone you killed deserved it.” Again slowly, as if knowledge she already possessed is rising to the surface. As if she's fitting the last piece into place before his eyes.

He shakes his head. “Many of them didn't.”

“Why did you do it, then?” she asks, but there's no real question in her eyes, and he realizes this is more about making him say it than anything else, and his mutilated heart leaps in inexpressible delight as he traces a finger along her lower lip.

“Because I wanted to.” That simple. It is. “I wanted to kill them, so I did. It's all the reason I need. It's all _you_ need. You take what you want because you want it. Nothing else matters.” The Outsider occasionally philosophizes to him, but that's always one-sided; this is the first time he's attempting to articulate any of this aloud to someone else, and if he gave a shit at all he might be floundering. But even what he articulates badly, or leaves unsaid, she'll know. “You've felt it, what it really is to take a life. What it's like to toy with it before you do.”

“It's good,” she breathes.

“You wanted it from the second you got the chance. And then all you wanted was to feel it again.”

She closes her hand around his wrist and nuzzles into his touch. “Yes.”

“There’s one person in particular you'd like to kill. Isn’t there?”

She draws in a sharp breath and holds it, her grip tightening—still no surprise, but her excitement is burning into something wonderfully like joy. “ _Father_.”

He leans in and down and grazes his lips against hers, pulls back and nods at the staircase. “They're waiting upstairs in their rooms. They should be waking up anytime now. And every single door to the outside is locked.” He flashes her a hard, ruthless grin. “Give her a head start. Be sporting about it.”

She stares at him for a few seconds longer, dazzling to behold, then tugs up her kerchief and launches herself away, so fast and so silent to the stairs and up them, her sword already drawn.

“Emily.”

She pauses on the landing and glances back.

For a second, simply gazing at her, he's speechless. He would have slaughtered the entire Empire just to see her look this way. Tonight is a gift for her, but in this moment there's nothing else in the world he could possibly ask for himself.

_Almost_ _nothing_.

He fits his mask back into place. “Lydia is mine.”

Just because he doesn't want to be totally left out. This party isn't for him, but after all, he's still a guest.

 


	23. this is the morning of our love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eight years of blood and lust have led Corvo Attano to this moment. There's no turning back now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing and I'm feeling good about life, let's celebrate with this. Completely appropriate to the occasion. 
> 
> ❤️

In the end, Esma’s shriek is what wakes her.

In one single movement Lydia jerks herself upright and looks wildly around, eyes wide—and immediately pinching themselves into a squint, because the room is brightly lit and for some reason the lights are far too bright for her. They pierce through her pupils and stab into her brain, and now that the shock of awareness is fading, nausea is rolling in on a thick fog.

Her bedroom. Her bed. She’s dressed for a party, her finest new suit of black silk and satin—for a moment that throws her into confusion, until it emerges from the fog: she was at Empress Emily’s ball, at Dunwall Tower. She was there with Esma…and then what? Why isn't she there now? Why did she come back to the house? Is it the small hours? Did she indulge herself too thoroughly and have to be taken home in her carriage by one of the footman?

It frankly wouldn't be the first time.

In any case, over-indulgence would explain the nausea and the dizziness, the painful glare of light that would ordinarily present no problem for her. Yes, no doubt that's what happened. She groans and drops back onto the bed, squeezing her eyes shut and pinching the bridge of her nose with fingers enclosed in black lace; did she do anything regrettable? Did she make a fool of herself? Worse, did she make a fool of herself in front of the Empress, or—stars forbid—in front of the Royal Protector, and endanger Esma’s prospects there? Esma seemed absolutely sure of where she stood the last time she spoke of it, and while she wasn't explicit about what she and Lord Corvo got up to in the back stairway, the greedy glint in her eye spoke volumes.

It's Esma, so any number of things might have happened.

 _Shameless hussy,_ Lydia said then, not without affection, and Esma’s sly grin slid across her face. _I expect you'll bed him before the two of you are even properly married_.

She'll simply have to hope that either she maintained some control over herself, or Lord Corvo is too infatuated with Esma to care that she didn't.

The time. What's the time? She opens her eyes and turns her head toward the door to the balcony; the curtains haven't been drawn—odd, the servants should know to do that if she's drunk too much—but she can see no light through the windows except the faint glow of the streetlamps beyond the garden wall. Before dawn, then. Gingerly, she makes the attempt to sit up, groaning as another wave of nausea washes through her, and peers at the bedside table and the clock.

Only just past one.

So early, at least relatively speaking. She frowns.

And as she does, another memory rises out of the vertiginous depths: a footman come to tell her and Esma that there had been a robbery at the mansion. What of the robbery? …That servants were hurt and some very valuable jewelry had been stolen, that the two of them had to come right away.

Lydia’s hand flies to her mouth. Her eyes widen again, this time heedless of the lamps. They did arrive at the house. They went inside. They… She sucks in a hard breath. The empty front hall. The deserted rooms. No one answering their calls or the servant’s bells. Disquiet gnawing her gut and twisting into something far too much like fear. And then…

What? What then? _What happened then?_

A shadow fell from the ceiling, then. A shadow that seemed to spread itself over her and smother her into the dark.

“Esma,” she whispers. “No, Esma…” But she herself doesn't appear to have been harmed. If she hasn't been, then surely—

But that _scream._

Her wandering gaze stops at the corner by the door. The room is so bright that all the shadows that would ordinarily be here now have been burned away. Except in the corner, somehow, and in that corner—

 _Death._

Death is standing in the corner, cloaked and hooded in black, staring at her with the empty sockets of its skull face.

She gapes at the figure. She would scream too, she would scream as loud as Esma, but her lungs are deflated like punctured balloons and her throat is numb, and try as she might she can't pull in air to fill them. She can't pluck at her frozen vocal cords. She can't even croak. She can make no sound at all, can't move a single muscle, and as she sits there, corpse-rigid with terror, the figure starts smoothly toward her, seeming to glide rather than walk across the floor.

It blurs in a sudden flicker of blue-white light, and then it's standing in front of her, looming over her—and she knows she's seen that skull face before.

“ _Run,_ ” Death hisses.

And as she thrusts herself to her feet and stumbles forward, desperately trying to find any speed at all and fumbling blindly at the doorknob, wrenching it open and hurling herself unsteadily out into the sickeningly tilted corridor, she hears him laughing.

~

He's never felt anything remotely like it. It's pure joy.

He searches his recollection as he starts after her—after five minutes by the clock, he also wants to be sporting about this and the woman is still clearly feeling the effects of the sleep drug—and tries to isolate any time, any moment at which he felt this hot rush with such ecstatic intensity, a flood of liquid fire roaring through his veins.

He finds nothing.

He feels drugged himself. Only this drug is sharpening everything into stark, otherworldly focus, his senses keener than they've ever been. He Blinks from the floor to the lamp outside the door and into the display room that sits at the center of the upper floor, pausing there to listen. It only takes him a fraction of a second to pick her up; even if she had enough wits to keep as quiet as she could, she's not exactly in a fit state to do so. She's at the other side of the entrance hall, hurrying toward Esma’s room.

Where Esma no longer is. She's made it as far as the first floor. His vision shifts sideways and through the gold-orange overlay he sees her down there, a glowing little form huddled behind one of the sofas.

Another form, darker, shining, hurtling at her and sending her tearing toward the banquet hall. A delightful scream rends the air. Lydia echoes it with a panicked Esma!

Behind the lenses of the mask, he rolls his eyes. If anything this is going to be easier than he thought.

~

But the Boyles do lead the two of them on a merry chase.

Mostly because he and Emily are operating according to an unspoken but perfectly understood agreement. Not too quick. Stretch it out. Once, twice, they come together by the back stair and then in one of the upstairs corridors—the two ladies have joined up and are stuffing themselves into one of the closets in the room that used to be Waverly’s and now serves as a music room—and the second time, for an instant he catches her by the shoulder and whirls her around and pulls her against him, and through the mask he can smell her. Her sweat, her excitement.

More than excitement. Deeper. Hotter.

Her arms circle around him. She's pressed all along his body. She must be able to feel it, what he's feeling. Big and hard against her hip. She simply must.

Tonight, he's revealing everything. What happens after that… is what happens.

They hunt together and it's glorious.

They hunt, and they hold back. The pleasure is in the pursuit. They don't catch and they don't take, not yet; they flush the women out of hiding over and over, give them just enough of a lead, and go after them again. From the music room back down to the smoking room, to the back stair, to the kitchen and the pantry and toward the cellars; he's sealed the door there, but it's barred, the chamber beyond perfectly visible, and from Esma’s horrified screech he gathers she's discovered the remains of the servants.

By now, even through their haze, they must have guessed what their fate is meant to be.

An hour of play. Then—and as before he doesn't have to tell her—he and she usher things toward a conclusion. Flushing out of hiding becomes herding, directing them bit by bit back toward the entrance hall.

He leaves things to Emily for a few brief moments and Blinks to the great chandelier that hangs at its center. He has one more bit of preparation to attend to.

One more little surprise.

He's just finishing when Lydia and Esma come tumbling down the broad stairway, Emily a bloody shadow close behind. The two of them stagger at the bottom, raise their heads and focus on him and open their mouths in unison to scream again—

He doesn't give them a chance. A wave of his hand and time stops, and he Blinks to a spot behind them, whirls, and with four neat cuts he severs the tendons at the backs of their ankles.

Time jerks forward. Their screams are abruptly cut off by agonized grunts as they go sprawling. Then they're screaming again, in pain and in new terror, and he doesn't bother with them for the moment. He leaves them to crawl weakly toward the front door, which naturally won't open for them anyway, and he turns to Emily. She's standing a few steps up, flicking her eyes from them to him, panting.

Waiting for his word.

He inclines his head toward the coils of rope on the floor beneath the chandelier, from which two other lengths of strong rope dangle.

No instruction needed. She nods.

She nods, and smiles like he's slashed her face in half.

~

It doesn't take very long. Not only is it now impossible for the two to walk, but they're exhausted, wrung out with fear and adrenaline crash, the aftereffect of the drug likely reasserting itself. They struggle as he and Emily bind their hands, but only weakly, and with streams of broken curses and equally broken whimpers, they give up.

“Take whatever you want,” Esma moans. “It's all… Everything in the house is yours, _everything,_ just please, please don't, _please_ don't—”

“—don't hurt us,” Lydia chimes in, the words coming out in a hoarse sob. “Don't hurt us, oh, don't, _don't_.”

 _As if we haven't already, you stupid cows,_ he thinks. But he doesn't speak. He won't.

Not until it's time.

They're slender women and not very tall, and the biggest difficulty in stringing them up by their wrists is their mostly dead weight, which makes things unwieldy. But together he and Emily manage it, and at last they step back to survey their work.

Esma’s mouth is bleeding; she split her lip on a side table. Lydia is sporting a blackening eye and a gash on her jaw. Blood is seeping from their ankles and soaking their boots, puddling on the floor and making a pretty lake at the end of the red river-smears from where Corvo hobbled them.

Emily glances at him, a question in her eyes. He doesn't answer her. He doesn't look away from those two panicked, haggard faces.

He reaches up and removes his mask.

Lydia merely stares at him. Her expression is bewildered, as if she simply doesn't understand what she's seeing. But as he turns his eyes and his smile to her, Esma starts to scream again.

She goes on like that for a short time. Politely, he doesn't interrupt her.

Beside him Emily is following his lead and removing her kerchief. Which is when Lydia faints.

He's remembering the Watch assassin he tortured as he lifts his hand and gives her face a single vicious slap, snapping her watering eyes open and trickling blood from the corner of her mouth. The first time it was like that. The first time it was that kind of pleasure. The first time it was that kind of play. He thinks back to that night, drinking in the sight of these two perfect victims, this moment of _apotheosis,_ and as he did with Daud, he sees the lineage from that moment to this, how it was that night when he stepped willingly— _eagerly_ —onto a road that could never have led anywhere but here.

He stepped onto it, and he took his daughter’s hand and brought her with him.

And she went as willingly as he did.

Esma has fallen silent. But she hasn't taken her shocked eyes off him, and now she licks her cracked lips and summons up a ragged whisper.

“It was you. Waverly. That night. It was _always_ you.”

He answers her with another smile. All those smiles he's given her, each one the coil of a constricting snake around her body. Now perhaps she's thinking back to each one, and she's seeing them for what they were.

He answers her with a smile, and Emily answers her with a backhanded blow across the face and her own cruel grin, and steps in close and grips her by the jaw as Esma shifts her attention to Emily, her features contorted with dread.

Lydia groans and sobs something he can't—and doesn't care to—understand. He said Lydia was his, and so she has been and will be, but in truth he's beginning to lose interest in her. This has always, in one way or another, been most about Esma.

It's petty. He doesn't give a shit.

For a moment, Emily does nothing more than look at her in icy silence, her lips parted and her nostrils flaring—like a hound scenting. Then she leans slightly up, and a heavy moan escapes him as she brushes those parted lips against Esma’s.

“He never wanted you. And you'll never have him,” she murmurs against Esma’s mouth—soft, so soft, but his senses are still bizarrely keen and he hears her as clearly as if she was whispering in his ear. And his knees nearly give out beneath him as if his own tendons have been cut, an inferno raging to life in the core of him at her next words.

“ _He's mine._ ”

The slice of her blade across Esma’s throat is so fast, it isn't until red sprays onto Lydia’s cheek that he realizes she's done it.

And for a few molten seconds he can only watch, breathless and utterly enthralled, as she raises her hands and bathes them in the blood pumping down over Esma’s white blouse, brings one of them to her own face and streaks crimson across it with a look in her half-lidded eyes like…

 _On her bed with her trembling legs spread and her fingers working between them, throwing her head back and arching as she came_.

Killing Lydia is an afterthought. He does it not for any real satisfaction but merely because he needs to finish the job. Her mindless cries of _Esma Esma Esma oh no no Esma no_ cut abruptly off into a wet gurgle and then into nothing as she goes limp and hangs.

They’ve been here before, he and she, lost together in the warm glow of After. But this is all new. It has never, in all his nights with her, been like this.

The force of his pride in her could break every bone in his body.

 _Red_. Red everywhere. Red on her, on her clothes and hands and face, the twin pools of it beneath the hanging corpses spreading into a lake and surrounding them, the light run through with spiderwebbed cracks like glass and the world shattering into jagged pillars of red and black—the hungry Void surging all around them, swallowing them whole, the mansion echoing with the Outsider’s delighted laughter, laughter rising to an orgasmic crescendo as Corvo’s sword clicks shut and clatters to the floor, and he turns and seizes his daughter by her flawless neck.

She has time to gasp the first syllable of his name before he seals his mouth over hers.

Every door he chooses will remain closed to every hand but his. And every door he chooses will open to him.

 _She wouldn't think to resist you._

She doesn’t.

More than that—she drops her own sword and throws herself against him, raking her bloody fingers into his hair and opening wide to him with a moan as he thrusts his tongue past her coppery lips and lashes it against hers. He never kissed the girl at the Golden Cat; for all these years there's only been the Outsider, and where the Outsider was ice-cold, Emily is _scorching_ him, burning under his hands when he clasps her waist and pulls her full-length against him. Her pelvis tilts, rolls, and she moans louder when he presses his straining cock against her belly and rocks into a slow grind. Tonight he reveals anything, and he couldn't possibly be any clearer now about what he wants to do to her—and his groan is ragged when she breaks the kiss long enough to hiss her command.

“Fuck me.” She sucks in a breath, and then sucks at his bottom lip. “ _Father_.”

He hurls her to the floor.

He's wanted her. He's thought about having her. He's entertained fragments of fantasies of what it might be like, what he could do. But he hasn't gone so far as constructing a complete picture of it, anything like a clear sequence of movements and acts. Yet he never anticipated that this would be careful or unhurried. This is, if he had ever built that scenario in his mind, exactly how he would have expected it to go: both of them kicking boots away, scrambling and dragging at each other's clothes so frantically they tear, slipping in the blood. Biting at her throat, her biting at his, fierce kisses along her clavicles that will leave bruises in the morning. Holding her down and shoving her legs apart with his knee and reaching between them, and her spasm and soft cry when he pushes his fingers past her wet, swollen lips and circles the entrance of her cunt.

 _Wet._ The slickness of her lust for him and the blood, the blood she spilled, the blood they spilled together, painted across their naked skin and soaking her loose hair and dripping onto his shoulders and _all drowning in it;_ kissing her again so ruthless and deep, growling and bucking into her hand when she curls it around his shaft and grips him.

 _Corvo_. The pleased whisper swirls through the hall. _Corvo, she's your daughter. She's your daughter, and there is nothing good left in you._

 _Be what you are._

“Emily,” he breathes, and her name twists into a growl which unravels at the edges, as she gives his cock a clumsy stroke and angles her hips upward and guides him inside her.

At first she's opening to him, so easy, and then there's an instant of resistance—and her taut cry, her teeth closing on the ridge of his shoulder and her nails digging into his upper arms as the resistance breaks and he thrusts into her as deep as he can go.

Stabbing her, to the hilt.

“ _Corvo_.” She sounds pained and for a fraction of a second he stops, braced up on his hands and staring down at her, searching her face for any sign that she does in fact want him to ease off—but she bares her teeth at him, her red lips peeling back in something between a grin and a grimace, tightens her thighs against his waist and arches.

“Fuck me,” she hisses again.

He does.

Hard and fast and sparing her nothing because he knows she's strong enough to take it, just like she's taken every one of his assaults before, he fucks her. Pinning her down in a pool of blood, licking it off her lips and chin and throat and raising his head as she licks at him, he fucks her; he drives himself into her over and over and their harsh groans mingle with the smack of their colliding skin. Death hangs above them, the last of the blood falling on them in a weak trickle; the mansion is _full_ of death, a palace of murder, a gleamingly luxurious charnel house, and here in the heart of it, Corvo Attano fucks his daughter until she's clinging desperately to him and keening his name.

Almost inaudible, possibly nothing more than his imagination, he hears the Heart weeping.

He smiles against Emily’s mouth and attacks her with another kiss.

She's rising to meet him now, giving as good as she's getting, and he can tell by the way her moans are winding up and up that she's closing in on the end; he lifts himself enough to make room for her when she maneuvers her hand between them and works awkwardly at her clit, and somehow he fucks her even harder, encouraging her—so close himself, wanting to bring her along, refusing to take his pleasure before she's taken the full of hers.

He maintains enough of his control to watch her when she arches one last time and starts to shake, her features twisting into something lost between agony and ecstasy, and just in time he wrenches out of her, snarling like a fucking wolfhound as he milks himself out over her belly.

He glimpses spatters of semi-translucent white across the film of red and he thinks _it's over._

He collapses onto her.

Not quite on top of her. He manages to avoid landing on her with all his weight. But he falls and then rolls to her side, panting like he's been sprinting—heaving with her, watching her body quiver as she begins to drift back down.

He cups her face and turns it to him and yet again he kisses her, gentle and slow and for a very long time.

The night isn't going to go on forever. But he's gotten what he wanted out of it. He suspects they both have, and regardless, even if the night ends… He was wrong. It's not over. It's nothing _like_ over. This night is going to end with a bloody dawn and the birth of something hideous and new.

They are what they are. They're monsters.

And they're free.

 


	24. you take me home to glory's throne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having crossed this one huge line, Corvo and Emily return to Dunwall Tower. But they're not quite finished with the party. 
> 
> And the Outsider isn't quite finished with Corvo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today has been immensely tiring and frustrating for a variety of reasons, so here, have this. 
> 
> (As Corvo realized in the last chapter: we aren't even close to being done)
> 
> ❤️

She waits in the candlelight as he draws the bath.

The journey home was a blur. Torn clothing and blood on his tongue, the dead cold of the Blink and her body pressed to his, her hot breath and her warm lips open against his throat. A thin rain was falling, the low-seated clouds blocking out what little light there would have been at that hour, and while it wasn't the most thorough shower, it did rinse the worst of the congealing gore away.

The Tower was mostly quiet when they entered it. Far below them, shreds of drunkenly slurred talk were still audible, but the upper floors were dim and still. Or that was his distinct impression, confirmed not long after; they reentered via the safe room and stepped out of the hidden door into her bedchamber. The lamps by the bed had been lit, the bedclothes turned down by the chamber maid. The rain drummed lightly on the windowpanes.

In silence they went to her bathroom and there they shed their filthy clothes, and now she's on the windowseat near the folding screen, rubbing the scales of dried blood off her arms and watching him with eyes as fathomless as the Outsider’s have ever been.

He doesn't know when he was last so aware of himself. Even the Outsider has never made him conscious of his own body the way he is now. It's not an unpleasant self-consciousness; far from it. The Outsider has never made him feel quite this way because, while he supposes the Outsider wants him, the Outsider has never looked at him with the literally naked hunger he sees on Emily’s face. And he's thinking now of the significance of that hunger and what she's seeing: A man nearing fifty—not gone to softness or fat, still all strong, lean muscle, but rough, battered, badly scarred on his arms and torso from six months of torture in addition to his multitude of other marks, his years visible in more than the flecks of gray starting to show at his temples and in his short beard.

He's nearly three times her age, and he's her father, and the ugly truth is that the sheer perversity of it is making his pulse race all over again.

He'd like to look at _her_ for a while. Map her lovely body with his eyes the way he has and will with his hands. But there’ll be time for that.

He'll make the time.

He turns away from her and lets her study him without his attention to distract her.

The water is just shy of hot when he turns off the tap and glances back at her with a faint smile, and as she rises and comes toward him he climbs into the tub and lowers himself down with a sigh.

She doesn't hesitate. She climbs in after him and settles back against him, resting in his lap, and he spreads his legs slightly to accommodate her. She lays her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes, her fingertips grazing over the tops of his thighs as if they're armrests, and she smiles when he leans in and kisses the edge of her cheekbone.

“You used to hate baths so much,” he murmurs.

She breathes a laugh and presses a little more firmly against him—where she must be able to feel him hardening against her ass. “This might bring me around.”

The kiss turns to a light nip, and he picks up the cloth and soap from its porcelain dish and washes her.

He goes slow. He takes his time, and he begins to learn her in earnest. Fucking her before was like an explosion—of frustration, of rage, of joy, of lust and horrifically insatiable love. At a final moment of breakage, all the walls came down. Now he wants to ease them both into it like easing into the bath, the overheated roar in his head subsided to low thunder, his lust and his love as insatiable as ever but content for the present to be contained. Outside the window, an anemic gray dawn is finally beginning to break through the continuing rain, but in here the shadows linger and the candles dance them around the room. She loosens even further in his arms as he passes the cloth over her shoulders and chest and face, sits her up so he can wash her back, and the water is an almost imperceptible pink once he's through with her hair. At that point she reaches for the cloth—he assumes she intends to return the favor—but he denies her and tugs her back against him. She's opening her mouth, he gathers to lodge a protest, when he silences her with his cock nudging between her thighs.

His hands close over her breasts and she moans, her head lolling to the side, and he knows he can do whatever he wants with her.

What he wants to do is rut lazily into the squeeze of her legs and tease her peaked nipples with his slick fingers, and when she's gasping and hooking an arm around his neck, he wants to slip one of his hands beneath the water and over the curls on her mound, find the nub of her clit and tease that too until she's shuddering and groaning his name, muffling the sound against his jaw.

He allows her to wash him in the cooling water. He doesn't allow her to make him come. He does let her touch his cock a little, lets her cradle it in her palm and feel its weight and how it's all for her and sees the heated fascination blooming on her face, and he closes his eyes, the low-burning candlelight flickering through his lids like dappled sun, and thinks of the blood, of her drenched in it and the sweetness of it on her skin.

The sweetness of her.

So after, when they're in her bed, he does what he dreamed of doing and he kneels between her legs, prostrates himself before his Empress, and, trembling with the intensity of his reverence, he tastes her and she's sweet beyond his wildest fantasies. He gives her all the skill of his tongue and his lips—it's been a long time but some things you never really forget—and does his best to drive her mad. She winds his damp hair around her fingers and tugs and laughs, sighs, whimpers and pleads with him to keep going, _just like that,_ and in the end he relents and sends her over the edge with rapid expert flicks and two fingers working in her cunt, and the rain—fiercer now—lashes the windows as she smothers her cries in the pillows.

Jessamine was always highly complimentary toward his performance of this particular task. He wonders if he should tell that to Emily. If it would discomfit her…

…Or if she would delight in the sick perversity of it as much as he does.

In terms of his own pleasure, he honestly forgot himself in the pure enjoyment of hers. But she hasn't forgotten. Once she's recovered she gives him another command and he won't disobey her; he lies back and she plays with him, explores him, toying with his cock and his balls in a way that reminds him deliciously of her inexperience—he doesn't need to ask her about it to be certain that, knowingly or not, she's been saving all of herself for him. But as always her confidence is absolute, and especially her confidence in what she can reduce him to—with minimal guidance and instruction from him when she asks him almost shyly what he likes—and it's not long before he's falling apart under her clever hands, clutching at her and groaning helplessly as she drags him to the edge and hurls him over.

Through the haze of his ebbing climax, he sees her tasting the come coating her fingers with a thoughtful expression. A fresh round of shivering takes him and somehow at the end of it he manages to make a vaguely questioning sound.

“I don't know if I like it,” she says, correctly interpreting the nature of the question. She grins wickedly and licks at his lips, and he greets her with his tongue and tastes the slightly bitter saltiness of himself. “I suppose I'll have to try more of it.”

He whispers her name and pulls her into his arms. She snuggles against him and is asleep in seconds.

For what feels like a long time, he lies awake that way, holding her and staring up at the ceiling as the room gradually brightens, thinking about nothing in particular. He's exhausted, but he doubts he'll sleep anytime soon, and in any case he can't stay here. He always had to steal away from Jessamine’s bed in the end, and this is so much more dangerous—for every conceivable reason.

He loved the danger when it was Jessamine. The constant risk was spice to the dish.

He's changed since those days. The man he was then is dead and gone. But that much, he thinks, might have survived the transition.

After an hour or so he carefully extricates himself and returns to the bathroom, retrieves a robe that fits him from the small dressing room that adjoins it, collects their cast-off clothes and goes silently to the safe room. The clothes he bundles into a corner; he'll deal with them later. His sword he tucks into his robe, and still silent, he makes his way to the tiny chamber inside the fireplace and from there to the corridor and his own rooms.

And of course his bedroom isn't empty.

The Outsider doesn't look up as he enters; he's reclining on Corvo’s bed, his legs crossed at the ankle, a study of the ancient traditions of the people of Wei-Ghon open in his hands. The room is lit with a combination of the lamp by the bed and the faint colorless illumination through the glass, but as usual the Outsider glows faintly with his own unsettling light. Corvo tosses him only a single glance as he passes, and drops the folded sword onto his desk with a metallic thud.

_So,_ says the Outsider, still not looking up, _that went very well_.

Corvo grunts. If he was honest, if he was forced to be, he would admit that he doesn't actually care for this particular company just now. Because this particular company will probably want to talk about it, likely do some gloating given that he's finally gotten what he's been demanding, and what Corvo wants more than anything else is to curl up alone in his own bed and soak himself in the ecstatically gory visions pouring through his head, the thrill of the hunt and the chorus of screams, and the memory of the taste of his daughter’s cunt and its heat clenched around his cock as he plunged into her.

Tonight did indeed go _very well._  

Tonight was perfect.

The Outsider turns a page. _It'll be interesting to see what happens when the bodies are discovered_.

“Robbers,” Corvo says quietly, and turns, a ghost of a smile twisting his mouth. The Outsider finally lays the book aside and meets his gaze with glittering black eyes. “Bandits and cutthroats. The entire household, murdered. Such a terrible thing.”

Mm. The Outsider’s lips twitch. _They'll even find a few valuables missing, won't they? Just enough to be convincing. Provided they don't look for them in the canal, that is._

Corvo grunts again, moves to the sideboard and unstoppers the decanter of whiskey. He pours himself a tumbler full and goes to one of the wingbacked chairs in front of the cold fireplace, sinks into it and regards the Outsider wordlessly, eyes narrowed.

_I find it even more interesting,_ the Outsider continues, folding his fingers comfortably over his stomach, _that you didn't want the Butcher to get credit for this one._ He pauses, cocks his head. _You know he may anyway, even with the thefts. There’s still the cruelty. The savagery. Your calling card, my darling._

Corvo shrugs. He doesn't care. Later perhaps he will—but he rather doubts it.

_So why? Tell me._

For a moment he considers refusing. Disobeying and tempting the consequences. But not tonight, not today, and he sighs and takes a swallow of whiskey.

“Tonight was just for us.”

_Us,_ the Outsider echoes. _Yes._ His tone is abruptly sardonic. _How very special._

Corvo gazes into the tumbler, watches the subtle spirals of the whiskey as he swirls it in its glass. The blood. Her skin. Her joy as she killed. The wet tightness of her cunt, breaking through her virginity—he was her first, her only—and her cry as she came. “What do you want?”

_Why, to congratulate you, of course._ He sits up, stretches languidly. _We should celebrate your completion._

“I'm tired.”

_I'm sure you are. That was quite a performance for a man almost in his fifties._ The Outsider’s lips curl. _Then again, I should hardly be surprised. You've performed that well for me often enough_.

Corvo looks sharply at him as something rises suddenly out of his weariness, throwing itself into focus. It's ludicrous… but that doesn't mean it can't be true. More ludicrous things have become a regular feature of his life.

“You can't _possibly_ be jealous.”

_Jealous? No._ But there's a flicker of something in that blackness, and he doesn't miss it. _Nevertheless, I'd be lying if I said the show you put on wasn't… inspiring._ The blackness floods out of him and whirls, and when it recedes he's naked, naked and pale and languid again, rolling onto his side and propping his head up on one hand as with the other he pats the bed beside him.

Corvo’s jaw tenses. He doesn't want to. For once, he doesn't want to.

But by those terrible black eyes, he _does._ Almost in his fifties or not, he stares into those eyes and glides his gaze over that slender form, the sly curve of those lips, and his cock is beginning to stiffen yet again as the rest of him waivers.

_Come here,_ the Outsider murmurs. A beat of nothing, and his eyes seem to flash even blacker than before. _Don't make me remind you of your place. You've been so good lately._

For a wild fraction of a second, he considers it. Holding his ground, throwing himself into resistance as useless as it is stupid, and the Outsider can simply _rape_ him if that's what takes his fancy.

Void knows Corvo has borne that ordeal before. More than borne it.

But he's well and truly erect now, heat woven into his muscles and through his nerves, and as if he's observing himself from the outside, he watches himself set down the tumbler and rise and walk slowly to the bed, shrugging off the robe and letting it fall as he goes. The light is fading and the shadows are crawling back in from the corners of the room: the Void enclosing them. They won't be disturbed. The Outsider pushes himself up as Corvo approaches, and when Corvo reaches the side of the bed a cold hand lays itself against his chest and slides at a leisurely pace down his belly. Softly, he moans.

_There you are._ The Outsider smiles and his fingertips dance lower. _My dear Corvo, you never disappoint me._

He doesn't. He genuinely wonders, as the Outsider draws him down, if it's in his power anymore to do so. The first night the Outsider violated him, he snarled in Corvo’s ear that he didn't control this, that he doesn’t control anything, and he has no reason to believe that's untrue.

But he also isn't certain that anyone else does.

_If she could see you this way,_ the Outsider whispers in his ear as he enters him in a single easy thrust, and Corvo releases a broken whimper and presses his face into the mattress. _Oh, yes… If she could see her father, her_ lover, _like this now._

_Perhaps someday she will._

 


End file.
